Aston Martin team principal and technical director Adrian Newey feels the outfit has been guilty of failing to consult with Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll adequately during the process of developing its Formula 1 car.

The works Aston Martin-Honda package has been the slowest on average at the start of the 2026 season and the new rules era, and has scored only one attrition-assisted point from the opening nine rounds.

Aston Martin is effectively in a holding pattern having elected to hold back upgrades - chief trackside officer Mike Krack accepted this meant "it is a fact" that the opposition "have moved on" in performance terms - a decision that was partly due to cost-cap considerations.

Two-time champion Alonso, who is yet to decide whether he will extend his F1 career into a 24th season, has voiced frustration at that strategy and a lack of incremental upgrades.

Speaking at Aston Martin's Silverstone factory prior to the British Grand Prix, Newey acknowledged it had been "extremely frustrating" for Alonso and Stroll "to not be able to race competitively with all the problems we've had, reliability and performance".

He added he'd felt compelled to spend time "going through with both Fernando and Lance exactly what we're doing, what we have planned with the upgrade package, what we have planned through going into the '27 season".

"Whilst it might not seem like it, we are very much listening to their comments and trying to act upon it," Newey insisted.

"If people don't feel as if they're being heard then they of course get very frustrated; it's human reactions.

"So perhaps we've been guilty of not spending enough time with Fernando and Lance, Jak [Crawford, reserve driver] here, kind of going through exactly what we are trying to achieve with the upgrade package."

The car upgrade is due to debut at the Hungarian GP before the summer break, with a second step planned for the first race after the summer break, the Dutch GP, the same race at which Honda will bring its sole planned engine upgrade of 2026.

Aston Martin's upgrade should result in a car that is heavily revised aerodynamically and also significantly lighter - it is currently believed to be in the region of 10-15kg overweight.

Explaining the development timeline, Newey said the decision to forego more granular upgrades was part of a reflective process that began when it became clear at the start of the season that Aston Martin would be significantly off the pace.

He hoped that would mean the team's current difficulties - which extend to unreliability as well as poor performance - would become a "distant", albeit "painful", memory.

"Our learning curve was behind, but it became quite obvious very quickly that we were not going to be competitive in the early races," Newey said.

"So we took the painful, but I believe correct, decision to not do any development through the first half of the year, knowing that would actually mean, as everybody else develops of course, the gap to the front would actually get bigger.

"But with the view to then really getting ourselves better-organised, putting a lot of different systems into place for the future and then really doing our research properly because the '26 car was done in a very compressed timescale.

"So it's enabled us to step back a bit, take a bit of pressure off ourselves - because I think we actually put ourselves under too much pressure over the winter - and take a deep breath and really understand our problems: what we need to achieve both medium term - which will be with this upgrade package that we hope to have ready in Hungary as a first stage, a second stage in Zandvoort.

"I've classed that [as medium term], now of course it's short term - at the time it was medium term and we made that decision - and then long term meaning decisions that will put us in a stronger place through this coming winter and into the '27 season. So that's what we've done.

"As I say, thank you everybody for their patience and understanding because it's very painful for us and for everybody, our partners, to see our current performance but hopefully this will soon be a distant...painful; painful still, but distant memory."