HONDA The Power of Dreams

17th　｜　1 min 21.69 s

DNS　｜　No Time

Alonso narrowly misses Q2, qualifies 17th after determined effort

Qualifying for the opening round of the 2026 season took place on March 7 at 16:00 local time under clear skies, with an ambient temperature of 20°C and a track temperature of 36°C.

Driving for the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team, Fernando Alonso headed out on track early in the 18-minute Q1 session. On his first run, he progressively improved his lap time from 1 min 23.011 s to 1 min 22.555 s. After the session was briefly interrupted by a red flag following another car’s incident, Alonso returned to the track in the closing stages on a new set of soft tires. Continuing to find improvements, he posted laps of 1:22.150 and then 1:21.969 to set his personal best and conclude the session.

Alonso remained in 16th position and within the Q2 cutoff for much of the final minutes. However, as the session reached its conclusion, several competitors improved their times, leaving him narrowly outside the top-15 and just missing progression to Q2.

Meanwhile, teammate Lance Stroll was unable to take part in qualifying after an issue was identified with the power unit’s internal combustion engine (ICE).

“We ran trouble free in FP3 and seemed to unlock a lot of lap-time in Qualifying by just running more laps. There is potential in the car, so it’s clear we need more mileage. We are short on batteries and so can’t risk too much tomorrow, but hopefully we can do as many laps as possible. We face this challenge together and everybody in the team and in Honda have been working flat-out to improve this situation.”

“It’s been a tough weekend so far with a few issues that have kept us from getting the laps we needed. The team in the garage have been working really hard, but there just wasn’t enough time to get the car rebuilt before Qualifying. We’re not where we want to be at the moment, but we’ll keep pushing and keep working to improve.”

“Another very busy day in Melbourne as we continue to make progress with the AMR26 working with our technical partner, Honda. Fernando was able to run important laps in final practice, giving us valuable data and information heading into Qualifying. Fernando qualified in P17 – just missing out on Q2 – and it is clear there is lots of hard work ahead of us. Lance was unlucky today with an ICE issue keeping his car in the garage during practice. After those issues were resolved, there was not enough time to rebuild the car and take part in Qualifying. It is clear the AMR26 has the pace to compete, so we will discuss with the FIA tonight our options for running Lance tomorrow.”

“Today in our first qualifying with the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team, we took a step in the right direction with Fernando’s car. We were able to see the progression from Friday to now, thanks to the sustained hard work from both parties at the track and at our respective factories. We continue to see signs in our data that the battery vibrations have decreased since Bahrain testing, and we will continue to work further on this. We unfortunately missed the third and final practice session this morning with Lance’s car. We had identified a power unit issue on the ICE side and, despite our best efforts, in conjunction with the team, the car wasn’t ready in time for qualifying. Our attention has now turned to preparing the power units for tomorrow’s Australian Grand Prix, our first race event in this new and exciting era of F1.”