This isn’t the homecoming Honda had been hoping for.
This weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix will be Honda’s first as Aston Martin’s works supplier in the first year of what was supposed to be a glorious new era for team and manufacturer.
Instead both parties are braced for pain.
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The car is so unreliable that neither Fernando Alonso nor Lance Stroll has yet to be classified at the end of a grand prix.
Even if it were to make it to the finish of a race, it’s so slow that it’s battling with newcomer Cadillac just to avoid finishing last.
Aston Martin has spent the last two races throwing Honda under the bus, but with underperformance at crisis levels, team principal Adrian Newey is poised to step down from the role to focus on his primary task of managing the design office.
Objectives have been necessarily rewritten. The idea that 2026 might catapult the team into the frontrunning group is long gone, but seemingly so too is the prospect of any sort of significant recovery this year.
Aston Martin isn’t on a title-winning trajectory; it’s not on any trajectory at all.
This is square one, and there are no guarantees about what comes next.
PIT TALK PODCAST: Audi team principal Jonathan Wheatley leaves his job less than a year after moving to Hinwil. Is a switch to Aston Martin now on the cards? And we look ahead to this weekend’s Japanese Grand Prix.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Aston Martin’s issues can be boiled down to one metric: kilometres.
From the moment it arrived late to pre-season testing to its double retirement from the Chinese Grand Prix, the team has been down on mileage relative to every one of its rivals at the dawn of the biggest regulation changes in the sport’s history.
Over the Australian and Chinese grands prix weekends it completed just 275 laps in total, or 1476.9 kilometres
Compare that to Mercedes, for example, which amassed 569 laps, or 3048.7 kilometres — more than double Aston Martin’s tally.
Alonso’s 31 uninterrupted laps on Sunday in China is the most for the team this season. He pitted at the end of lap 31 and then retired one lap later with numbness in his limbs from the extreme vibrations from the engine.
The engine is the cause of these reliability problems. It’s literally shaking itself to death — shaking itself so hard that the battery pack fails. Though Honda developed some temporary fixes for the Australian Grand Prix, Alonso revealed in China that one of the approaches was simply to use the engine much more gently.
“Some of the steps we did were achieved artificially,” he said, per Autosport. “I mean, just lowering the RPM of the engine and things like that, so everything vibrates less.”
The countermeasures protecting the battery don’t protect the driver. The shaking is amplified uninhibited by the chassis and into the driver’s hands and feet. It was so bad during testing that the drivers feared it would cause permanent nerve damage.
Honda does not know why the engine is vibrating, but the corollary of the need to manage it is that the car effectively operates detuned, nowhere near it theoretical performance limit.
Keeping the revs artificially low is part of it, but being it also means the power unit’s hybrid architecture hasn’t been tested — how well it regenerates and deploys electrical power. We know after two rounds that there’s significant finetuning needed to get the most from the hybrid motor this year — consider the gap in engine performance between Mercedes and McLaren, both using the same engine.
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HOW DID IT GO SO WRONG?
Honda powered Red Bull Racing to two of the last four constructors titles and Max Verstappen to four of the last five drivers championships. When Aston Martin announced it had convinced the Japanese brand to reverse its withdrawal from Formula 1 and commit to the 2026 regulations, it was justifiably presented a big win for the ambitious team.
But the Honda of today feels a lot more like the Honda of 2015–17 during its disastrous and ill-fated relationship with McLaren.
That’s because, according to Newey, it is much more like the Honda of those early days.
“Honda pulled out at the end of 2021,” he explained. “They then re-entered the sport, kind of, at the end of 2022, so over roughly a year, a year and a bit, out of competition.
“When they reformed, a lot of the original group had, it now transpires, disbanded and gone to work on solar panels or whatever, and so a lot of the group that reformed are actually fresh to Formula 1. They didn’t bring the experience that they had had previously.
“Plus, when they came back in 2023 [to start work on the 2026 regulations], that was the first year of the budget cap introduction for engines, so all their rivals had been developing away through 2021 and 22 with continuity, their existing team and free of budget cap.
“They re-entered with only — I’m guessing — 30 per cent of their original team and now in a budget cap era, so they started very much on the back foot and unfortunately, they’ve struggled to catch back up.”
That also explains why Honda has turned up with a less competitive engine than fellow new manufacturers Audi and Red Bull Powertrains. Audi obviously has significant engine-building experience, while Red Bull hired significantly from Mercedes, Austrian powertrain brand AVL and, perhaps critically, Honda.
Remarkably, Newey claimed he had been unaware of Honda’s novice status until late last year, when he followed up on rumours that the Japanese marque was behind schedule.
“We only really became aware of it in November of last year when Lawrence, Andy Cowell and myself went to Tokyo to discuss rumours starting to suggest that their original target power they wouldn’t achieve for race one, and out of that came the fact that many of the original workforce had not returned when they restarted,” he said.
Newey was Red Bull Racing’s technical director until early 2024, when it was still the de facto Honda works team, and joined Aston Martin last April. Reports of Honda’s workforce issues have been circulating since at least 2023.
It’s impossible not to interpret Newey’s comments as a tacit admission of Aston Martin culpability — whether for the insufficient due diligence conducted before signing the works deal or for inattentiveness afterwards — as much as it is an attempt to pin blame on Honda.
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IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT THE ENGINE
Not pushing the engine also means the car’s mechanical and aerodynamic components have also yet to be truly tested.
The team’s gearbox, for example, has come under regular scrutiny dating back to pre-season testing. It’s the first time Aston Martin has had to build all or most of its own transmission since 2008, when it was still known as Force India.
Stroll, son of team owner Lawrence Stroll, didn’t mince his words during qualifying in China.
“This is the worst piece of shit I’ve ever driven in my f***ing life,” he said.
He also called the car “undrivable” during the session, complaining of random snaps of oversteer and wheel locking. These aren’t engine problems
Despite this, Aston Martin believes — or at least believed — its car has the potential to be one of the best out there.
“I could be horribly wrong, but my assessment would be that we are, from a chassis performance view, kind of in that middle group, so definitely behind the leaders,” Newey declared boldly in Melbourne. “What is that gap? I don’t know, I am guessing somewhere around three quarters of a second, maybe a second.
“We have an aggressive development plan in place. Already with what we have, where we have got to in the factory with that development plan, had we had time to bring it here to Melbourne, we would be significantly ahead of where we will be over the weekend.
“Given a bit of time, I see no inherent reason within the architecture of the car why we can’t become on the chassis side close to if not fully competitive.”
It’s an even more remarkable claim in retrospect.
If we take every team’s fastest qualifying lap from each weekend, we can see that only two teams are within a second of Mercedes.
Aston Martin, meanwhile, is battling with Cadillac — and the American-owned team’s average is weighed down by Melbourne; in China it was neck and neck with Aston.
Average gap to fastest
1. Mercedes: fastest at every race weekend
2. Ferrari: +0.725 seconds
3: McLaren: +0.742 seconds
4. Red Bull Racing: +1.134 seconds
5. Alpine: +1.668 seconds
6. Haas: +1.735 seconds
7. Audi: +1.769 seconds
8. Racing Bulls: +1.824 seconds
9. Williams: +2.610 seconds
10. Aston Martin: +3.567 seconds
11. Cadillac: +4.002 seconds
The gap from where Aston Martin is and where it thinks it should be is enormous. A fully competitive power unit would account for much of it, but it’s impossible to say for certain that it would account for all of it.
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It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that the team will start this weekend’s grand prix with its leadership under a cloud.
There are no sackings in store, but Newey is tipped to step down from the team principal job sooner or later to make room from Jonathan Wheatley, who resigned from the Audi top job last week.
Newey joined Aston Martin as managing technical partner last April to head the design team but took the helm in January. The team never indicated it would be anything other than a permanent appointment, even as Newey’s enthusiasm for the job appeared to extend only so far as saying he took it because he was going to be at “all the early races anyway” — though he ended up skipping the Chinese Grand Prix.
But it seemed likely at the time and is clear in retrospect that taking the team principal job — with its commercial, sponsor, media and other commitments — would take Newey away from his core task of masterminding the car. Clearly the car could use some more masterminding at the moment.
Either Newey was naive about the workload or Aston Martin put all its eggs in the Newey basket, believing him to be the silver bullet for success.
No single person can be so influential or hold that much responsibility for a team. After only three months — but still too late for this season — Aston Martin appears to be correcting course.
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SO WHAT’S THE OUTLOOK FOR THIS WEEKEND?
Suzuka, a circuit built and owned by Honda, is likely to show up the worst of the Aston Martin-Honda package.
Still, the team is attempting to remain positive that it is making baby steps back to respectability.
“We have seen progress over the last days,” chief trackside officer Mike Krack told SiriusXM at the end of the Chinese Grand Prix. “On the Thursday of the Melbourne race, of the season opener, people asked me, ‘Can we do maybe five or six laps?’
“We missed some sessions in Melbourne. Lance missed the whole Saturday. Fernando missed the whole FP1. This was not the case [in China] — we managed to be out on time in all the sessions.
“It’s only a small progress, because I think from an F1 organisation, you need to be able to expect that you are out in each session, and that you can run each session. But we are in the situation we are in, and we take it step by step.”
The challenge was heightened in Shanghai especially given it came just days after the season opener in Australia, where the team’s struggles were laid bare.
“We cannot produce miracles in such a short time,” Krack said.
The team has had the benefit of a fortnight back at base to take stock and appraise what can be fixed in time for this weekend in Japan.
The motivation to show signs of life in Honda’s house will be extremely high.
“We must find more solutions to establish the cause of the vibrations affecting the drivers,“ said Shintaro Orihara, Honda trackside general manager and chief engineer.
“We have also focused our efforts in the gap between China and Japan to continue to improve our reliability, but still our performance is not where we want it to be, especially regarding energy management.
“Suzuka Circuit is a tough track for this, so we have been using the learnings from Australia and China to prepare better for the Japanese Grand Prix.
“We are not at the level where we wanted to be going into this weekend, but we will keep working hard to maximise our package.
“We are looking forward to seeing the home crowd and the Honda fans. I want them to see that we have made some progress since Bahrain.”
Progress is all that matters now. There’s only one direction of travel from square one.