Lance Stroll and Fernando Alonso will start a fifth straight season together at Aston Martin in 2027. Photo: Aston Martin Aramco F1 Team
Aston Martin has three points from 15 rounds of the 2026 Formula 1 season, and every one of them belongs to Fernando Alonso. On Tuesday the team confirmed that it will change precisely nothing about the people driving its cars: Alonso and Lance Stroll have both extended what Aston Martin calls “long-term contracts” and will start 2027 as teammates for a fifth consecutive season.
Strip away the language about “valuable depth of racing knowledge” and the official announcement is really a diagnosis. When your two cars have made it to the chequered flag as classified finishers only 13 times in 30 race starts, the drivers are not the first line item anyone at Silverstone is circling in red. Aston Martin has decided its problem lives in the car and the power unit, and it wants two known quantities in the seats while it fixes them.
That’s a defensible call. It’s also a bet with a very specific shape, and it’s worth looking at what the team actually just signed off on.
The season Aston Martin is choosing to build on
The official 2026 constructors’ standings after the Azerbaijan Grand Prix have Aston Martin 10th of 11 teams on three points. Only Cadillac, in its debut season, is behind them. Williams sits ninth on 12. Mercedes, for scale, leads on 538.
The race-by-race record is where it gets uncomfortable:
- Fernando Alonso: nine classified finishes, six DNFs. His points came from 10th at Monaco and 9th at Zandvoort, per his official 2026 results. He is 19th in the drivers’ standings.
- Lance Stroll: four classified finishes, ten DNFs and one non-classification in Australia. His best result is 13th in Hungary, and his official 2026 record shows zero points. He is 21st.
- Combined: 17 of the team’s 30 race starts have ended without a classified finish. Neither car was classified in Australia, China, Barcelona, Monza or Baku.
Retirement causes vary race to race, and not every DNF is a mechanical failure. But a 57% non-finish rate is not something two drivers produce by themselves. This is the first season of Aston Martin’s works partnership with Honda under F1’s new power-unit rules, and we’ve already looked at why upgrades alone weren’t going to rescue the Honda package and how the latest step arrived in Madrid with a grid penalty attached. The team’s own statement is careful but not blind: Executive Chairman Lawrence Stroll says the “short-term focus remains on improving performance.”
Alonso took his time, and the timing tells you something
Alonso’s own statement contains the most honest line of the day: “I took my time to make this decision.” He did. He went into the September race weekends without a deal for 2027, which we argued at the time was no reason for either side to panic. The answer, when it came, was a full commitment rather than a one-year farewell tour. Alonso describes himself as “committed for the long term.”
Some context on what “long term” means here. Alonso turned 45 in July and will turn 46 during the 2027 season. He is already the most-started driver in the championship’s history, and Aston Martin notes he has contested 85 Grands Prix for the team since 2023, with eight podiums. None of those podiums came in 2026.
So why would a double world champion re-sign for more of this? The generous reading is the one Alonso gives: he believes in the people, the facilities and the partners, and he thinks he still has the speed. The practical reading is that 2027 is the second year of a new regulation cycle, historically the point where teams that got the fundamentals wrong can close big gaps. For a driver of Alonso’s age, walking away now means his last memory of F1 is a car that finishes half its races. Staying means he gets to find out whether the Honda program was a slow start or a structural failure. That’s a question he’s clearly curious about.
For the team, his value in a season like this isn’t results. It’s calibration. When engineers are chasing correlation between the simulator, the wind tunnel and a car that keeps stopping, a driver with more than two decades of reference points can tell them which problems are real and which are noise. The announcement leans on exactly that, citing “technical insight” as a reason for keeping the pairing together.
The Stroll question can’t be answered with this data
Stroll’s extension will be read through one lens by a large part of the audience, and the fact behind it is not hidden: the team’s executive chairman is his father. That’s a legitimate governance point, and it means Stroll’s seat will never be judged purely on lap times, fairly or not.
But if you try to judge him on performance this year, you quickly run out of material. Stroll has been classified at the finish only four times in 15 races. The teammate comparison barely exists: there have been just three races in which both Aston Martins were classified. Alonso finished ahead at Miami (15th vs 17th) and Silverstone (18th vs 19th). Stroll finished ahead in Hungary (13th vs 14th). That’s a 2-1 split fought over the lower half of the order, which tells you almost nothing about either driver.
What the numbers do show is that Stroll has absorbed a heavier share of the team’s bad luck, bad reliability, bad decisions or all three. Ten DNFs to Alonso’s six is a gap that deserves a proper breakdown by cause at the end of the season. Stroll, who will be entering his 11th F1 season with more than 200 starts behind him, says he believes the team has “the resources and the people to become a winning team.” His 2027 will be judged on whether he can make the most of the car if it becomes one.
Continuity is a strategy only if the direction is right
There is an engineering argument for doing nothing in the driver market. A team rebuilding its package wants as few variables as possible, and a new driver is a big one: different feedback, different setup preferences and a period of learning how the team works. Aston Martin says the continuity lets it “fully focus on its development path.” That’s true as far as it goes.
The counterargument is that stability suits teams that are already moving in the right direction. Aston Martin is asking F1 to trust that this one is, and the evidence so far is mostly promises from Silverstone and Sakura. If the 2027 car is a real step, the team will have two experienced drivers ready to harvest points from day one. If it isn’t, it will have spent another year with the oldest driver on the grid and a teammate whose seat invites a question every time the car stops.
For the rest of the driver market, the effect is simple. Two 2027 seats are now formally off the table, and anyone who was hoping Alonso’s deliberations would open a door at Aston Martin can stop refreshing the team’s news page.
What to watch over the final eight rounds
- Finishing both cars. Both Aston Martins haven’t been classified in the same race since Hungary in July. Getting both cars to the flag regularly is the most basic sign that Honda’s reliability fixes are working.
- Ninth place in the constructors’ championship. Williams is nine points ahead. Where a team finishes in the standings affects its share of F1’s prize fund, so a couple of top-10 finishes in the run-in would carry real value.
- Stroll’s first points. A zero-point season would be the first of his F1 career, and it would hang over the new contract all winter.
- The next race. Round 16 is the Bahrain Grand Prix, which is being held at Malaysia’s Sepang circuit on October 2–4. Yes, a “Bahrain” race in Malaysia. F1 hasn’t raced there since 2017, so it’s a new track for this generation of cars and a hot, heavy-braking test of cooling and reliability. That’s exactly the kind of weekend that will show whether Aston Martin has made any progress.
Aston Martin has made its call on the drivers. Now the car has to justify it.
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