Fernando Alonso's Aston Martin AMR25, powered by the outgoing Honda hybrid V6, at the 2025 Emilia Romagna Grand Prix in Imola.
Lance Stroll couldn’t set a qualifying time at the first Spanish Grand Prix run on Madrid’s new Madring circuit. The stewards let him start anyway. Then they sent him to the back of the grid for an unrelated reason: Aston Martin had swapped power unit elements before FP3, tipping Stroll over his season’s allocation. He lined up 21st and retired after 12 laps. Fernando Alonso spent the afternoon two laps down in 17th. Neither car scored a point.
That is not, on its face, a story about a team going backward. Somewhere inside that FP3 component change was Honda still chasing a fix for a problem it has been unusually candid about all season: the Aston Martin power unit is short on raw output, and every attempt to close that gap keeps costing grid positions faster than it’s buying lap time.
This is the first season of Formula 1’s rebuilt power unit rules, with a roughly even split between combustion and electrical power and no more MGU-H, and Honda used the reset to walk away from Red Bull and build its new RA626H exclusively around Aston Martin. A pure works deal like that is supposed to be the payoff for years of patience: total control over how the engine and chassis are packaged, in exchange for owning every one of the power unit’s problems in public. It has been twelve years since F1 last tore up its engine rulebook this completely, back when the current hybrid V6 turbo era began, and Aston Martin is discovering the harder half of that bargain first.
Honda’s answer arrived at the Dutch Grand Prix in August: an updated RA626H, badged Spec 2, with a reworked combustion system built for more power plus updates to the battery and other electrical hardware. It was explicitly pitched as the tool to close the gap for the second half of the year. Alonso backed it up immediately, finishing ninth at Zandvoort for Aston Martin’s best result of the season at that point, while Stroll retired with an unrelated failure. One data point isn’t a trend, but it was the first sign the new spec might actually do what it said on the tin.
Aston Martin’s own technical leadership has been unusually blunt about what that upgrade is and isn’t. Chief Technical Officer Enrico Cardile said plainly that Honda has acknowledged being behind its rivals on overall power, with driveability, how usable that power actually is at the limit, as the current priority. He also disclosed that the new-specification engine showed what he called undesirable behaviours when it was run during a filming day held after the Hungarian Grand Prix, and that Honda spent the short turnaround before Zandvoort largely mitigating them. That’s not spin. It’s a supplier and a customer describing the same unfinished project from two ends of the garage.
Monza, a week and a half later, was the reality check. Honda kept refining Spec 2 for a circuit that punishes any power deficit more than almost anywhere else on the calendar, but Alonso started from the pit lane after further power unit changes and both cars retired before halfway. Backfire covered that weekend as it happened, and the uncomfortable question left hanging afterward was whether Honda would spend a second development token before the season ended or bank it for 2027. Madrid didn’t answer that question so much as restate it with a grid penalty stapled on.
Here’s the part of the rulebook doing the damage. A power unit is broken into separately homologated elements, the internal combustion engine, the energy store, the control electronics and so on, and every driver is only allowed to use a fixed number of each across a season without being penalized. Swap in an extra one before your allocation is up, for any reason, and the grid penalty is automatic regardless of whether the change is a performance upgrade or a reliability fix. Stroll’s Madrid penalty doesn’t tell us which one it was. What it tells us is that Honda is still making changes to this power unit often enough to keep bumping into that ceiling, two Grands Prix after Spec 2 was supposed to be the fix.
None of it shows up in the standings yet. Through Madrid, Aston Martin sits 10th of 11 constructors with three points total, all of them Alonso’s, ahead only of Cadillac, a team that didn’t exist twelve months ago. Mercedes leads with 503. That gulf is the real cost of a rules reset that everyone expected to shuffle the order, just not quite like this. It also explains why the team’s rebuild hasn’t stayed confined to the engine bay. Aston Martin is already losing trackside personnel to rivals betting the current pain is temporary, and every one of those departures reads differently against a power unit still finding its feet in public.
Baku is next, on September 24-26, and it is a useful, if imperfect, test. Long straights punish a power deficit the way Monza’s did, but the walls and the ninety-degree castle section reward a driver who can lean on the chassis Cardile says has taken its own significant step forward this year. If Aston Martin can bank points there without another element swap forcing its way onto the timing sheet, that’s a genuine signal. If it can’t, the pattern holds: Honda keeps finding performance in the factory, and keeps handing it back on the grid before the car ever gets to use it.
Alonso has been remarkably patient with all of this, framing 2026 as a cost paid toward a car he expects to be genuinely competitive in two or three seasons rather than treating it as a verdict on the whole project. That’s a reasonable bet for a manufacturer with Honda’s engineering pedigree to make good on eventually. It’s a much harder one for a 45-year-old driver to make with the seasons he has left, and it’s the real reason every Honda upgrade this year is being read as closely off the track as on it.
Aston Martin didn’t get a bad power unit in Madrid. It got a preview of exactly the trade Honda signed up to make when it walked away from Red Bull’s four titles to build something from scratch: real progress, delivered a component at a time, with the bill for each one due immediately and the payoff due later. The upgrade path is real. So is the grid penalty. Right now, only one of them is showing up on Sunday afternoons.
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