The Athletic

The Races.

The races on, and Aston Martin dominated the headlines in the final part of the Barcelona

test when its aggressive Adrian Ui creation broke cover, while Lewis Hamilton ended the five days of running with the fastest time for Ferrari.

But does the Aston Martin speed match its looks, and it's Mercedes really the team to worry about?

I'm Ed Strawn joining me to hit the big stories from testing are John Noble and Scott Mitchell Mound.

Right, Scott, let's get on with it with the car that caught everybody's

attention when it finally rolled out of the garage on Thursday afternoon. The Aston Martin AMR 26.

Has Adrian Newey played a blinder? He certainly led the design of something very different.

And if even half of the novel-looking ideas on that car

turn out to be enough of a step ahead of the conventional designs that we've seen,

then yes, that could well be the class leading car of 2026, because

there's elements to it that I'm sure could be replicated if needed, but there are others that

are clearly tied to major mechanical decisions like the front and the rear suspension and other

things that presumably relate to the specific nature of the packaging of the Honda engine and

the cooling requirements around

it where you see the very interesting engine bodywork shape, for example. That is just bodywork,

so I imagine that won't be a make-or-break design choice, but things like the front suspension

and where the rear suspension, where part of that is mounted, for example, not so easy to

replicate that if that ends up being a small edge. But the big question is, does it actually

work? Because it arrived so late in this test and ran so little in this test, we have no idea,

even by testing standards, and this test standard in particular,

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