Lance Stroll and Fernando Alonso will start a fifth straight season together at Aston Martin in 2027. Photo: Aston Martin Aramco F1 Team
Every time a works engine program stumbles, someone in the cheap seats asks the same thing: why not just buy a better one? For Aston Martin, the obvious “better one” carries Red Bull and Ford badges. Nothing we have seen from Aston Martin, Honda, Red Bull or the FIA puts a supplier switch on the table, so treat this as a thought experiment. It is still a useful one, because the answer exposes what is actually wrong with the Aston Martin Honda engine project, and why a swap would only restart the clock.
Here is the argument in one line: Aston Martin’s season has been lost as much to reliability and integration as to peak power, and a customer deal would reset the exact work that is only now starting to pay off.
The scoreboard is ugly, and that is the point
After Austin, Aston Martin is 10th of 11 teams in the official standings with seven points. Alpine has 69. Racing Bulls, which runs Red Bull Ford power, has 102. Red Bull Racing has 355, level with McLaren. Only Cadillac, on zero, is behind Aston Martin.
Those seven points matter more than they look. At the August half-term mark, Aston Martin had one, from Fernando Alonso’s tenth place in Monaco. Three rounds (Australia, China and Barcelona) went unscored because both cars retired, and the team came out of Bahrain testing with roughly a third of Mercedes’ mileage. Vibration, which the team tied to both the chassis and the power unit, limited running from the start. That is not the profile of an engine that is simply short on peak power. It is the profile of a package that had not come together yet.
What Honda has actually changed
Honda’s second-specification unit arrived at the Dutch Grand Prix. According to Honda chief engineer Shintaro Orihara, the changes were a revised pre-chamber for faster combustion, a new piston shape and modified lubrication to cut friction. Honda gave no horsepower figure, only that it had met its internal target. The stated aim was to move Aston Martin toward Racing Bulls and Alpine.
That is a combustion and friction fix, not a rescue package. Adrian Newey, meanwhile, described holding back updates earlier in the year as a painful decision because the team felt it was standing still. In other words, the car and the engine have been on different clocks. A new supplier would not fix that. It would put both on a new one.
Red Bull Ford is a yardstick, not a free lunch
Red Bull Ford is the strongest argument for a swap, and it deserves respect. Verstappen took third in Austin, and Isack Hadjar was sixth. But this is a first-year engine program, and its own people have never pretended otherwise. Laurent Mekies called the decision to build the unit “as crazy as it gets”, and the announced customer list is Red Bull Racing and Racing Bulls, nobody else. After the Austin race, Verstappen said the engine’s consistency over the distance was something the team still had to work on.
We have looked at the limits of using Red Bull Ford as the benchmark and at why its Singapore sweep still came in year one. Both points apply here: a unit that wins races for its home team is not automatically a unit that slots into someone else’s chassis.
Why Honda has earned patience, within reason
Honda’s own history is the strongest counterweight. Formula 1’s own reporting has compared this start to the 2015 McLaren reunion, a partnership that ended badly, followed by a move to Red Bull that produced one of the sport’s best engines. The lesson is not that Honda always recovers. It is that Honda recovers on its own timetable, and that the recovery is built on a long list of unglamorous fixes.
Aston Martin is also Honda’s only Formula 1 partner in 2026, which means the engine gets built around one chassis and one set of priorities. Switch to Red Bull Ford and Aston Martin becomes a customer in someone else’s queue. That is analysis, not a statement from either company, but it is the trade-off a swap would force.
What to watch next
Watch the gap to Alpine and Williams, not the headline result. Watch whether Aston Martin keeps reaching Q2, which it managed only once before the summer break. The Austin race was a reminder of how fragile this is: Alonso said the team was competitive until damage compromised the car, and Stroll started from the pit lane after repairs to his car following qualifying. Both cars finished a lap down, in 15th and 16th, on a day that Kimi Antonelli turned into a one-stop win up front.
Aston Martin does not need a different engine badge. It needs the next few races to show that Spec 2 and the updated car are finally pulling in the same direction. If they are not, the swap question will come back with real teeth. Right now, it is the wrong question.
Lead image: Lance Stroll and Fernando Alonso. Photo: Aston Martin Aramco F1 Team.
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