Fernando Alonso in his Aston Martin during the 2025 Emilia Romagna Grand Prix at Imola.
Fernando Alonso spent Thursday before the Italian Grand Prix telling reporters he trusts Honda “one hundred percent.” By Sunday evening, both Aston Martins were parked long before the finish, and Honda’s power unit still didn’t have an answer for Monza’s front straight. That gap between the press conference and the timing sheet sums up Aston Martin’s first season as a Honda factory outfit: total faith in public, and a total of three points where it actually counts.
Three points from thirteen rounds. Zero podiums. Zero poles. Both cars retired at Monza alone. Only Cadillac, a team that didn’t exist a year ago, sits below Aston Martin in the constructors’ championship. That is not the season anyone at Sakura or Silverstone budgeted for when Honda walked away from Red Bull, the partner that delivered four straight drivers’ titles, to build a power unit around Aston Martin from scratch.
Monza Confirmed the Pattern, It Didn’t Create It
Lance Stroll’s race ended with what the team described as a hydraulic issue. Fernando Alonso’s ended after he ran wide over a kerb and picked up damage the team wasn’t willing to risk running to the flag. Aston Martin’s Chief Trackside Officer Mike Krack gave a plain account of a difficult weekend, but Stroll was more direct about the underlying cause, saying flatly that “we don’t have the power we need at the moment.”
None of that was a surprise. Aston Martin personnel had already flagged Monza as one of the circuits least suited to the Honda-powered AMR26 days before a wheel turned, and Friday practice confirmed it: Alonso’s best lap was more than two seconds off the pace and comfortably the slowest car on track that wasn’t a Cadillac.
Honda Is Working the Problem, Just Slowly
Honda’s Trackside General Manager Shintaro Orihara has been candid about where the power unit actually stands. The revised specification that made its race debut at Zandvoort brought a genuine step in raw output, confirmed on the dyno before it ever left the garage, but it also exposed a driveability problem serious enough that Honda spent the following weeks retuning combustion characteristics just to make the extra power usable. That isn’t the profile of a manufacturer sandbagging its rivals. It’s the profile of one still learning its own engine mid-season, in public, at the sharp end of the grid.
The Part of the Rulebook Nobody Outside the Paddock Is Watching
Here’s what makes Honda’s situation different from Red Bull’s. Formula 1’s Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities system works by measuring how far a manufacturer’s internal combustion engine falls behind the fastest one on the grid, then granting extra homologation upgrades and cost-cap relief to whoever qualifies, since the 2026 rules otherwise freeze power unit development for the season. When the FIA confirmed its second review period last month, Honda was one of four manufacturers already sitting on that relief, banked back in June: two additional upgrades for this season, two more for next, plus a sliding scale of extra dyno time and budget headroom that Red Bull Ford Powertrains still isn’t allowed to touch.
On paper, that should be an advantage. In practice, it’s a reminder of how blunt the tool is. ADUO eligibility is judged purely on the combustion engine, but Honda’s own public description of its problems keeps pointing at driveability and deployment, the electrical and calibration side of the power unit, not the raw output of the ICE. A manufacturer can have every legal right to spend money fixing whichever component it wants, and still burn a homologation token on the wrong half of the car if that’s where the real deficit lives.
Why the Next Upgrade Might Be More Symbolic Than Decisive
Power units were homologated back on March 1 and are frozen for the rest of the year outside of safety, reliability or cost-related changes, so whatever Honda has already spent on the Zandvoort-to-Monza combustion work has eaten into a genuinely finite allowance. With Madrid and the closing stretch of the calendar left to run, there isn’t much season left for a second upgrade to bank meaningful lap time even if Honda deploys it before the flag falls on 2026. The more useful comparison point is 2027, when Honda’s carried-over relief gets a full season to actually compound.
What Alonso’s Patience Is Actually Buying
Alonso has been careful to frame this as a short-term cost, not a verdict, pointing to Honda’s history of eventually getting a rules reset right and setting his own timeline at two to three seasons rather than the five or six it took the manufacturer’s last F1 project to find its footing. That’s a driver in his mid-40s spending some of his final competitive seasons betting on a manufacturer solving, by 2027 or 2028, a problem it hasn’t solved yet in 2026. It’s also a reminder that Aston Martin’s rebuild isn’t confined to the engine bay: the team has spent this season reshuffling its trackside leadership too, most notably losing longtime race engineer Tom McCullough to Red Bull for 2027.
What to Watch in Madrid
The new Spanish Grand Prix venue in Madrid is an unknown for every team on the grid, but Aston Martin’s own read is that it should suit the car better than Monza’s long straights did. That’s a low bar to clear. The more useful number to track this weekend isn’t where Alonso or Stroll finish, it’s whether Honda actually spends its second banked upgrade before the season ends or holds it back entirely for 2027. Either choice tells you how much of this problem Honda thinks is fixable in six weeks, and how much it has already written off until next year.
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