Aston Martin arrived in 2026 expecting to fight for podiums. Instead, with Adrian Newey's first car under the new rules, the team has spent the season near the back — and the people picking it apart increasingly point at the chassis, not just the Honda engine bolted behind it.
For weeks the convenient explanation was the power unit. Honda's 2026 engine has been rated among the weakest on the grid, and Aston has publicly wrestled with it. But on Peter Windsor's YouTube channel, former race engineer Mark Slade argued the split is roughly even. People close to the team, Windsor said, reckon the engine is "about 50% of the problem" — "the other 50% seems to be the car."
Slade's theory centres on ride height. Newey, he believes, read the 2026 regulations and chose to run the car with a very high rear, the aggressive "rake" philosophy that Red Bull rode to success in the previous ground-effect era. "Adrian read the rules and decided that he wanted to go down that route again," Slade said. The trouble is that the FIA wrote the new rules specifically to stop teams pushing dirty air away from the floor, and a high rear ride height makes a car far more sensitive to that dirty air being drawn underneath it.
The result, Slade explained, is a floor that never switches on. "The car designed around running a higher rear height just isn't working, because the floor isn't working properly because of the ingestion of dirty air from the outside," he said. While rivals started with a low rear and are slowly raising it as they learn to control the airflow, Aston came at the problem from the opposite end and got stuck. Slade traced it to a familiar Newey pattern: "He will come in and say, 'I've looked at the rules and I think the ultimate fastest car will have this concept. So that's how we're going to start'" — and expect the aero department to solve the downsides later. At McLaren decades ago it worked. This time, Slade suggested, the fixes have not come.
Inside the team, the diagnosis is just as bleak. Chief trackside engineer Mike Krack refused to pin the slump on any single component. "I think it's everything. Yeah, I think we need to improve," he admitted. "If it was only one thing, it would be quite easy." After a Spanish Grand Prix where both cars qualified nearly four seconds off the pace, Krack conceded the gap felt surreal: "When you are between three and four seconds off, you think you are driving in a different category."
The drivers have run out of patience. Fernando Alonso, who retired alongside Lance Stroll before half-distance in Barcelona, branded the AMR26 the worst car and engine combination of his long career. The mood among neutrals is no kinder. The Formula Duck channel called Aston's season "embarrassing and borderline offensive," reckoning that even a heavily revised B-spec car might only drag the team up to where Williams sit.
Aston has stopped bringing trackside updates, saving everything for a major redesign Windsor says is already underway; no significant upgrade is expected before this weekend's Belgian Grand Prix. Whether that redesign unwinds Newey's rake gamble or doubles down on it will define not just the rest of 2026, but the credibility of the most expensive design signing in the sport.
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*Originally published on [Newsformula One](https://newsformula.one/article/aston-martins-2026-slump-neweys-rake-gamble-misfires). Visit for full coverage.*