Fernando Alonso used the Thursday press conference in Shanghai to lay out in direct terms what a recovery looks like for Aston Martin in 2026, and how long it is likely to take.
The short answer is: longer than anyone at the team would like. The more complete answer is that the recovery has two distinct phases.
First, fix the reliability problems that have left Aston unable to complete normal race weekends. Then, once the car is running consistently, address the performance deficit that will still exist even when it is.
Those are two separate problems, on two separate timelines, and Alonso was careful not to mix them.
While his rivals arrived in China having spent the winter accumulating laps and refining their understanding of the new 2026 regulations, Aston Martin has not.
The gap, as Alonso describes it, is not marginal.
“If they completed 1,000 laps since the Barcelona test, we completed maybe 100, so we are nine or 10 times behind,” Alonso said, gesturing toward Alpine ‘s Pierre Gasly and Haas driver Esteban Ocon beside him.
“So, if they are still not perfectly optimised, imagine ourselves.
“We are at square one, so we really need the laps, we really need to be able to practice and to find the window on the car and the chassis side.
“That will obviously be very important for the weekend, and I will be happy if we leave China with a more or less normal free practice, more or less normal quali, accumulating laps and probably attempting the full race on Sunday, if we are allowed.”
Alonso ‘s Australian GP weekend was not very productive
Grand Prix Photo
“Square one” is not false modesty or strategic expectation-management. It’s a description of where Aston Martin finds itself relative to a field that has had considerably more time to understand cars that everyone is still finding deeply complex.
The team has been short on parts, limited in running, and unable to complete the kind of consistent, incremental work that builds a competitive baseline.
The consequences were visible in Melbourne, where Aston endured a somewhat embarrassing weekend during which Alonso managed a grand total of 69 laps, 21 of them in the race before retiring.
The Aston Martins qualified 19th and 20th for the Shanghai sprint race and attempting Sunday’s full Grand Prix, for a two-time world champion in his fourth season with the team, is a sobering target.
The two-stage recovery
Alonso acknowledged that the top priority in Aston’s recovery plan is to find the reliability missing since the car made its debut in Barcelona.
The Spaniard said that Aston Martin is still being surprised by problems it hasn’t yet identified, let alone fixed.
“We still have too many issues and too many unknown issues that are coming day after day from nowhere, so it seems that we are not on top of the problems yet.”
Until they are, he can’t give a precise timeline, but he’s hoping that within a couple of grands prix, the team can at least complete sessions normally.
The second phase is performance, and Alonso is more cautious there.
Even once the reliability picture stabilises, Aston Martin will find itself behind on power and on the accumulated understanding that comes from track time.
“To be competitive, I think that will take more time, to be honest, because once we fix the reliability then we will be behind in terms of power and things, so there are two steps, let’s say, and hopefully the first step will come soon,” Alonso added.
The Honda dimension
As it has been well documented, Alonso has been here before, in a different team with the same engine partner.
Aston’s mechanics had been hard at work
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His years with McLaren-Honda between 2015 and 2018 were defined by a power unit that was not ready when the partnership began, and by a frustration that occasionally spilled into the kind of radio outbursts that followed him for years afterwards.
Alonso is sanguine about that now, and characteristically direct about what he thinks it proved.
The suggestion is that the paddock now understands what he was dealing with then, when he was shouting “GP2 engine” on the radio, because they can see its echo in 2026.
“Some of the things that people thought about me 10 years ago, when we had this situation, now they maybe changed opinion and maybe they think that I was right 10 years ago,” the 45-year-old said.
“That project, the power unit, was not mature enough when we started, which everyone seems now to understand.
“So now I think when everyone sees from the outside that situation and they see the current situation, I think they are a little bit more friendly with us and they understand more the problems.”
The difference this time, Alonso argues, is structural.
Aston Martin is not simply waiting for Honda to solve its problems in isolation. The team is working as one unit, allocating its own resources toward areas where it can support the power unit development.
It’s a more integrated partnership than McLaren-Honda ever was, and Alonso is keen on highlighting the distinction.
“We can allocate some of those resources to make Honda… or they can focus on one thing, and we can help them in some other areas,” Alonso said.
“We are one team. It’s a bumpy start, but I hope it will not last for too long. But it will not be an immediate solution either.”
The view from outside
Alonso’s two-stage framework makes more sense when set against what is known about the structural situation at Honda.
The power unit problems Aston Martin is experiencing did not emerge from nowhere, and it is not simply a matter of a new formula proving harder than expected.
Honda’s current racing department is a significantly smaller operation than the one that produced the championship-winning engines in partnership with Red Bull.
When the Japanese manufacturer withdrew from Formula 1 at the end of 2021, the engineers who had built those power units dispersed widely across the parent company, largely into environmental and sustainability projects.
What remained was a skeleton crew capable of maintaining and developing the existing units through to the end of last season, but not the full creative force that had originally built them.
As veteran Formula 1 journalist Mark Hughes described recently in the Motor Sport F1 Show podcast, those engineers are now “spread everywhere throughout the company.”
The two timelines – Honda’s reconstruction, Aston Martin’s recovery – are running in parallel, and neither is straightforward.
The situation inside the Silverstone operation adds another layer of complexity.
Andy Cowell, widely regarded as one of the great engine minds in F1 from his time leading Mercedes‘ power unit programme, joined Aston Martin with a brief focused on preparing the team’s infrastructure ahead of Adrian Newey’s arrival – the Silverstone side of the operation, rather than the Honda relationship in Sakura.
His departure from the team principal role, and the circumstances around it, have left Newey in a position he did not seek or plan for.
“I think things just happened and he ended up being the guy holding the baby because basically as far as I believe is Andy Cowell wasn’t prepared to continue under the way Adrian wanted to operate it,” Hughes said.
“And so that left him at the 11th hour without a team principal. So Adrian, because I think he doesn’t like to be have controls imposed upon him in terms of his technical creativity. I think he just thought, the easiest way now then is just, ‘Oh I’ll just do it then’.
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“But I don’t think it was his ambition. And I don’t think in an ideal world, that’s the role he would have chosen.”
Whether that arrangement evolves into something more settled is another variable in an already complicated picture.
None of this is to say the project is broken. Alonso, notably, is not saying that. What he says is that he and the team is working as one unit with Honda, allocating resources toward areas where Aston Martin can support the power unit development rather than simply waiting.
It is a more integrated approach than his McLaren-Honda years produced. Whether it is enough, and whether it is fast enough, is what the next several races will begin to reveal.
Perhaps one of the most surprising things about Alonso this year has been the absence of visible frustration.
Newey suggested last week that Alonso must be in a “hard mental place,” but the two-time champion pushed back.
“Less tough than what you think,” he said when asked how tough his current reality is. “I mean, not ideal.
“Obviously, we are now in this journey with the team, which is not the ideal start, but it’s the first year of this collaboration between Aston Martin and Honda and we have to go through this moment in time, and I’m ready to help as much as I can.”
