How Aston Martin is navigating its issues, as Honda plots ADUO updates

Every adjective that could be conceivably used to describe Aston Martin's start to the 2026 Formula 1 season has surely been exhausted, and few of them would ever be considered as positive. 

It's been a bruising opening five months for the Silverstone squad, to put it mildly. The perfect storm of a late chassis arrival, an underpowered Honda powertrain, and the vibration issues produced when the two parts got close to each other, have extruded the team's to-do list. Presumably, this now spans more pages than Tolstoy's War and Peace...or, for our American readers, the receipt after buying one tube of Chapstick from CVS. 

Unsurprisingly, the team has had all hands on deck trying to fix the issues, which has prompted it to put all of its potential aerodynamic updates onto the back-burner. Aston Martin will implement these later this year in one big batch, with the expectation that this will arrive at Spa or Zandvoort.

While Aston Martin's name has been followed by a blank page on F1's pre-event update documents this year, it doesn't mean that it isn't tucking into the feast of issues on its table. In solving the vibration issues, which has allowed the AMR26 to go for much longer distances without causing irreparable damage to the drivers' nervous systems, other problems have emerged. 

Gear synchronisation has been one of those issues. If the 'gear sync' is a fraction off, that means the drivers will perform a shift, with a delay before the gearbox responds to the input. This means that you don't get the upshifts at the right point in the power and torque curves, meaning that the car's acceleration is hindered slightly. 

This was improved between Miami and Montreal. Let's not forget that this is the first time that the team has built a gearbox since 2008, back in its first season under the Force India name; since then, the team has run with McLaren and Mercedes transmissions. It's been a steep learning curve to develop its own unit.

"Yeah, it's progress always," Fernando Alonso said in Montreal, after retiring with a seat issue. "Every time we hit the track, there are some new things on the car and on the engine, on the settings, on the gearbox. From Miami to here we improved a lot the gearbox, the gear sync, the downshifting. 

Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin Racing

Photo by: Alastair Staley / LAT Images via Getty Images

"So how that translates into lap time is difficult to quantify. But definitely we were faster here than Miami with exactly the same car just because we fine-tuned things. So I expect a lot of small things happening between here and Monaco and hopefully another step forward.

"But the fundamental problem and the three seconds of the pace will have to come from the power of the engine and from the aero package and that will only come in the second part of the year."

Alonso's seat problem was another issue that had emerged through the car's greater reliability, as it became apparent that the Spaniard couldn't cope with the discomfort. This should be as simple as remoulding a new one in the factory. 

Honda has also identified where it feels it can make up the difference for next season, regardless of the regulatory set for next year. Its trackside general manager, Shintaro Orihara, detailed some of the key points involved. 

The ADUO regulations, which allow an upgrade token for engine suppliers for every two-percent deficit they hold against the best performing engine, have been tweaked to help Honda; this was extended to allow a concession of extra budget and operational hours for anyone below 10%. 

Per Orihara, Honda needs to improve the speed of its combustion phase and reduce the internal friction of the engine. However, with the FIA's plan of increasing the fuel flow for next year for a 60-40 split in outputs between the engine and the electrical components (which has faced resistance from Ferrari and Audi), he says that Honda also needs to consider the reliability aspect in next year's engine.

"Performance-wise, the direction is the same. Again, we need to improve combustion performance. It doesn't matter 60%, 40%, or 50-50. We need to improve our combustion speed," Orihara said. 

"If fuel flow rate is increased next year, we just do additional tuning. But the direction is the same. And also, for example, less friction. Again, it doesn't matter the percentage.

Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin Racing

Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images

"So performance-wise, the direction is the same. We keep working hard for this year, and that will connect to the next year's engine development. 

"But reliability-wise, it may be quite challenging if we've got more fuel flow rate. That is a more challenging point from this regulation change.

"We have brought some updated parameters and tuning [to Montreal], and we observed positive things on the data.

"Still, drivers have requested a lot to improve. But we have seen positive things on the data, which say our direction is right. So still, there is a gap between driver demand and our torque delivery.

"But we see how we can improve this gap or reduce the gap. Previous event, it's hard to tune our torque delivery to match the driver. But we found a way to reduce that gap. And that works with this event. So we will keep working on this direction to reduce the gap between driver demand and our torque delivery."

There's still a very long road for Aston Martin and Honda to extricate itself from the woods. The spine-shattering vibrations have been quelled, and the subsequent issues that have Whac-a-Moled their way up are being handled piece by piece. 

Sure, Alonso managed to drag some bright-but-brief flashes of performance out of the car in Canada but, for now, the team will have to keep answering the familiar "what's next" questions as it grapples with the disappointment of its reality. In a crisis, pragmatism reigns.

Additional reporting by Stuart Codling.