Is Aston Martin reliving McLaren's 2015 nightmare?

Formula 1 has a long memory, and right now, as Aston Martin‘s AMR26 spent the final day of testing stranded in a Bahrain garage for what feels like the hundredth time this fortnight, that memory is whispering something uncomfortable: We’ve seen this before.

Eleven years separate McLaren‘s catastrophic reunion with Honda and Aston Martin’s deeply troubled start to the 2026 era.

Yet the similarities between the two situations are so striking and so specific that they feel less like coincidence and more like a Greek tragedy being restaged with an almost identical cast.

Same championship. Same engine supplier. Same driver. And very nearly the same level of public embarrassment.

But the story is not as simple as history repeating itself, because alongside every eerie parallel there’s a counterpoint that could make this a very different tale in the end.

The hype was real, until it wasn’t

Both McLaren and Aston Martin entered their respective pre-seasons riding a wave of optimism.

McLaren in 2015 had rebuilt the legendary partnership that had delivered Ayrton Senna three world championships.

Ron Dennis declared Honda’s engine “mindblowing” and “a piece of jewellery”. It felt, genuinely, like a restoration of a golden age.

Aston Martin’s 2026 ambitions are, if anything, even more grandly stated.

Lawrence Stroll has spent hundreds of millions transforming the Silverstone campus into a state-of-the-art facility.

The team lured Adrian Newey – the most celebrated designer in the sport’s history – away from Red Bull.

It had secured a works partnership with Honda.

The entire paddock seemed to accept that Aston Martin would challenge the established top four right from the start.

In both cases, the gap between expectation and reality proved seismic, at least up until this point in the year.

The difference: McLaren’s hype was driven almost entirely by the mythology of the 1980s partnership and Dennis’s characteristic force of will.

Eric Boullier, then McLaren’s racing director, later revealed he visited Honda’s Sakura facility in 2014 and was alarmed by the lack of progress, only to be repeatedly reassured by Dennis that it would “all work out OK.”

Aston Martin’s optimism, by contrast, is at least grounded in something tangible: a designer with an a record of building championship-winning cars across four decades, now with full authority to shape the programme from the ground up.

Honda’s reliability crisis

At the heart of both disasters lies the same company.

The technical root of McLaren’s 2015 nightmare was a drastic power shortfall that took more than half the season to understand, partly because the initial reliability was so bad that the engine had to be run in heavily de-tuned form just to keep it operating long enough.

Throughout 12 days of testing in February and March 2015, McLaren barely managed any significant long runs, and found itself over 2.5 seconds off the pace set by Mercedes.

Fast forward to 2026, and Honda finds itself in a strikingly similar position.

The AMR26 has suffered multiple power unit failures across both Bahrain tests. Lance Stroll spun into the gravel in what appeared to stem from a technical fault. Fernando Alonso was halted by a battery-related issue during a race simulation.

And, on the final day, Aston managed just six laps, leaving it as the team with the fewest laps completed over the whole of pre-season testing, a mammoth 350 laps behind its closest rival, and F1’s sole new team, Cadillac.

The difference: Honda in 2015 was, by Boullier’s later account, clearly “years behind” its rivals when it returned to the championship, having only begun developing its hybrid turbo engine at the end of 2012 when Mercedes had started as early as 2009.

The Honda of 2026 is a fundamentally different organisation, one that subsequently won four consecutive constructors’ championships with Red Bull, and which understands the hybrid architecture intimately.

Honda’s official return to F1 in 2026 has almost certainly been compromised to some extent in terms of resources and manpower by its decision to provide only technical support to Red Bull between 2022 and 2025, but this is a delay in readiness, not a fundamental deficit in knowledge.

The core competence should be there. The question is whether it can be deployed quickly enough.

Alonso: The common thread

Perhaps the most extraordinary parallel of all is Alonso himself.

In 2015, the two-time world champion returned to McLaren convinced that Honda’s power would eventually unlock the team’s chassis potential.

He endured a full season of misery — most memorably screaming “GP2 engine, GP2!” over team radio at Honda’s home race in Suzuka — before spending two further tortured years and then eventually walking away.

Now, at 44, he finds himself in an oddly familiar position. When asked before testing about the team’s struggles, he acknowledged being “a little bit on the back foot” but insisted that with Newey’s chassis, there was no doubt they would “find a way to have the best car eventually.”

It is the language of a man who has been here before and has learned from experience, managing expectations, keeping faith, trying to hold things together through sheer force of conviction. For now at least, that’s a very different Alonso from the 2015 version.

Still, the irony is almost too much to bear. Alonso is not just experiencing a McLaren 2015 flashback. He is the flashback, reprised in full.

The difference: In 2015, Alonso was 33 and had a decade-plus of competitive racing ahead of him. Time was not a pressing constraint.

In 2026, he is turning 45, openly undecided about his future beyond this season, and has said he will base his decision on whether the car is competitive. The stakes of a slow recovery are therefore higher, not just for the team’s season, but for whether it becomes the team that finally makes Alonso give up on the dream of a third crown.

That creates pressure to deliver results that McLaren never felt quite so acutely.

The pressure cooker within

Away from the track, the internal atmosphere in McLaren’s case deteriorated quickly.

McLaren in 2015 saw open sniping between chassis and engine departments almost immediately, with Dennis insisting the car was competitive.

There was a fundamental communication and cultural gap between the two sides, and very little sense of genuine partnership at any stage.

The relationship never truly recovered its mutual trust, and the collaboration limped on for three increasingly miserable seasons before the separation.

At Aston Martin, the warning signs are similarly familiar.

A reshuffle saw Andy Cowell moved sideways to a newly created chief strategy officer role, with Newey assuming the team principal position.

Reports suggest there were clashes between Cowell as team principal and Newey as managing technical partner — a tension exacerbated by the fact that Newey is also a shareholder, empowered by Lawrence Stroll to run things as he sees fit.

Trackside engineering changes have already been made, with a new senior race engineer structure put in place around Alonso before a single grand prix has been run.

The difference: critically, a restructure at Aston Martin has happened before the season began, not after years of accumulated frustration. In resolving the chain-of-command question by handing Newey full authority, the team has potentially closed a wound that McLaren allowed to fester until it was fatal.

It is a painful process, but arguably it should be the right kind of pain.

The elephant in the room

There is another parallel that may prove the most damaging of all: the possibility that individual technical gremlins are masking something more fundamental.

In 2015, what appeared to be a series of isolated issues turned out to be rooted in Honda’s “size zero” packaging concept – a fundamental design choice that chronically constrained the power unit’s development potential for years.

The issue was that the optimum size of turbo in F1 was increasing as power electronics improved, but that growth was simply impossible within the engine vee as Honda had configured it.

For Aston Martin in 2026, the warnings are similar.

Its wind-tunnel programme started four months late, with knock-on consequences throughout the entire development cycle, including being absent from nearly the entirety of the first test in Barcelona.

The AMR26 features a new power unit, new gearbox, and new rear suspension – all introduced simultaneously, making it very difficult to isolate individual problems.

Chief trackside officer Mike Krack was candid at the end of the Bahrain test: “The main challenge has been dealing with some reliability issues that have limited our time on track. This leaves us on the back foot going into the start of the season, because we haven’t been able to complete all of the usual tasks typical of winter testing.

“We recognise there is a huge amount of work ahead, and everyone involved in this project knows where we need to focus to improve our situation.”

The difference: The more honest distinction is not about regulatory timing per se — after all, 2014 was itself a sweeping overhaul, and Mercedes had essentially cracked the hybrid formula before rivals had even properly fired their engines. By 2015, the performance hierarchy was already solidifying at an alarming speed.

What is genuinely different in 2026 is the specific nature of the technical challenge, and how evenly distributed the uncertainty appears to be. The new rules are widely considered the most complex the series has ever introduced simultaneously.

Unlike 2014, when Mercedes’s advantage became apparent almost immediately and only grew, the early signs in 2026 suggest no single team has the package fully resolved.

That is not the same as a free pass. Mercedes in 2014 proved that a head-start in a new era can translate into years of dominance before rivals catch up. But it also means the window in which Newey could identify something fundamental and act on it may be meaningfully wider than anything available to McLaren in 2015.

Whether Aston Martin can stay solvent in points terms long enough to reach that window is another question entirely.

How does this end?

This is where the parallel ultimately offers both warning and, tentatively, hope, if for no other reason than that no one can predict the future.

McLaren’s 2015 was not the end of its story. The team eventually got rid of Honda, rebuilt around a customer Renault engine, made a series of inspired appointments in Zak Brown and Andrea Stella, and won the constructors’ championship in 2024 and both titles in 2025.

Honda, meanwhile, powered Red Bull to consecutive titles before formally withdrawing. Both parties recovered. Both became champions. But the road was extraordinarily long — a decade, in McLaren’s case.

For Aston Martin, the immediate future looks genuinely bleak, a race finish in Australia already sounding like a tall order.

The points deficit over the opening months of the season could be severe.

However, Lawrence Stroll has the financial resources McLaren could only have dreamed of in 2015, when the team was quietly fighting for its commercial survival.

Newey has the design talent, the regulatory knowledge, and now the institutional authority to impose his vision completely.

Honda has the technical foundation that was so conspicuously absent 11 years ago.

And the regulatory reset means that what looks like a chasm at the start of February need not look the same at the start of September.

Aston Martin’s early 2026 echoes McLaren’s 2015 almost perfectly. The question is now whether Aston can write a different second act.