Aston Martin has, as Fernando Alonso pointed out, found three seconds over two Formula 1 race weekends.
Alonso himself scored points for only the second time in 2026 in the Netherlands as he took the team's best finish of the season.
Plus, Honda says its new engine that arrived at Zandvoort hit its key target. Sounds promising, right?
Not entirely. Lance Stroll still says the car is a lottery to drive, and both drivers, plus team principal Adrian Newey, named the exact same problem with the engine after the race that is now a priority to fix.
The Race has spoken exclusively to Honda's F1 chief engineer Shintaro Orihara to hear the inside story of what has been done with its new engine, what's still not working, and why taking the next step could turn out to be incredibly difficult.
How good is Honda's spec 2 engine?
From Honda's perspective, there were reasons to be encouraged by the evidence of the Dutch Grand Prix as Alonso took a best result of the season in ninth.
The revised power unit didn't have any reliability problems over the weekend and Orihara was happy that "everything was working as expected" with the cooling and lubrication elements of the revised engine.
In terms of extra power, Honda was not revealing much - although it is likely to be somewhere in the range of 10-30bhp so far.
"We achieved our internal target from the dyno and then we have confirmed the same improvement trackside," said Orihara.
However, he accepted Honda is "still far away" from F1's top manufacturers and that there is one big fix that's still needed.
It’s something the drivers, Newey and even Honda itself are aligned on.
As Orihara said: "We know that there is room to improve our driveability and this remains paramount for us looking ahead to the next races."
What exactly is Honda's driveability headache?
Driveability is a pretty generic term, but The Race has learned about the specifics behind what is happening at Honda and why the drivers need more.
In simple terms, when F1 figures talk about driveability it is about the engine responding in line with what the driver requires.
The most common assumption is that this revolves around making sure that the engine delivers power in a predictable way when a driver gets on the accelerator. But it's not just that.
Driveability also counts for corner entry, too, because engine braking is a critical element of performance, so manufacturers have to carefully manage how things operate off-throttle.
Ever since F1 became a hybrid formula - first with KERS and most recently with the turbo hybrid engines - driveability has also included how the engine braking works in conjunction with the MGU-K and energy harvesting.
The new challenge is that, when the driver lifts off the throttle or brakes, the engine switches from powering the rear wheels to acting as a generator (via the MGU-K) to feed the battery.
It's a complicated process because there needs to be an incredible amount of synchronicity between the engine feeding the MGU-K, being able to have the perfect amount of engine braking through the right combustion, plus how this interacts with the brake-by-wire adjusting how much is required of the rear brake discs.
Plus you need to add on top of this the impact of downshifts from the gearbox.
To further increase the challenge, when the battery has reached 100% capacity, or has hit a charge limit for a particular corner that the team does not want to go over, then the engine has to instantly stop harvesting - which removes a big deceleration force.
This transition phase, as the engine returns to normal engine braking behaviour, needs to be carefully managed.
As Orihara revealed: "If the driver lifts off the throttle, there is engine braking, but then the MGU-K is harvesting 350kW so the operation point is almost double.
"Then the MGU-K power is decreasing, and engine torque is also decreasing, but the driver demand is 0N. To achieve 0N it is very complicated.
"It is communication between the engine, combustion, and MGU-K control. That is one of the areas we need to improve, how we organise this combination."
If any of these driveability elements are out of kilter, then it can result in the kind of issues that Alonso and Stroll have repeatedly experienced.
The engine braking may be too harsh and that creates instability, the battery may not harvest enough, the engine could push the car into understeer, or the seamless shift gearbox may reject a downshift as it does not have the synchronisation to engage a lower gear.
The difficulties of mastering all these driveability challenges have also escalated hugely with the 2026 regulations.
This is down to two factors. The first is that the increase of the battery influence to almost 50% of the power available has meant that it is even more critical to ensure that the harvesting phase is done as well as possible.
Plus, the loss of the MGU-H - which generated energy from the turbo - has robbed manufacturers of a very valuable tool that assisted with harvesting.
This is because electrical energy could previously be sent from the two MGUs - therefore bypassing the battery totally.
Achieving good driveability requires the right software configuration, plus the right combustion characteristics for the engine not to deliver power while the driver is not on the throttle.
This is something that Honda has struggled with during 2026, not only under braking but also under acceleration. As Orihara said: "Sometimes our combustion is not stable."
The change of power unit rules for this year, as well as Honda working with new fuel and lubricant suppliers, Aramco and Valvoline, means it has not been achieving all that it wants in this area.
So there are clear gains Honda can find from improving combustion on both acceleration and deceleration.
Bringing all this together, until Honda's driveability is sorted then neither it nor Aston Martin will know what the true potential of its engine is because only then will the full power be unleashed.
That is why Alonso said it was hard to judge just how much better the spec 2 engine was.
How Honda is fixing the problems
A fix for the driveability issues requires Honda improving its calibration and introducing revamped software to ensure that the internal combustion engine is doing exactly what the drivers want.
Following the first day of track running at Zandvoort, Honda used the data to work on improvements at its Sakura R&D base overnight.
A new calibration was introduced for qualifying on Saturday, and this did produce a step forward. But more is needed.
Orihara admitted this was "still not enough for the drivers" but it has at least confirmed progress is happening, and further work will be done to make gains for the Italian GP.
There will be no miracle solution that solves all of the driveability headaches instantly, but it will be a case of Honda working hard on the dynos during this fortnight between Zandvoort and Monza.
It then has to continue chipping away at its understanding as it faces tracks with different corners, different energy and engine braking demands, and different surfaces.
Alonso felt there are "a couple of tenths" to come if Honda optimises the package which, based on when things went right at Zandvoort, will push Aston Martin right into regular points contention - as his ninth-place finish in the Netherlands, though well-executed, still owed plenty to an opportunistic one-stop strategy.
However, it is fair to say the overall performance of the Aston Martin-Honda upgrades has thrown up some encouraging results.
Having started the year 3.1% off the benchmark pace in Q1, Aston Martin slumped to more than 4% adrift at Barcelona, the Red Bull Ring and Silverstone, as rivals developed their cars.
It finally closed the deficit in Hungary, reaching Q2 with its upgraded chassis, but it was never closer to the front than at Zandvoort last weekend when the new Honda engine arrived.
Even with Aston Martin messing up its execution in qualifying when Alonso got stuck behind Esteban Ocon on his outlap, his Q1 time was just 1.4% adrift of the benchmark.
Highlighting that Q1 pacesetter, McLaren's Oscar Piastri, was only 1.3 seconds ahead, and referencing the many times Aston Martin had been more than four seconds off, Alonso said: "We improved three seconds in two races. This is amazing."
If Honda's progress does bear fruit (although there still may be struggles at power-sensitive tracks such as Monza) this will almost certainly be enough to convince Alonso to stay as he weighs up his future.
Right now, we still don't know if he actually wants to stay in this team, or in F1, in 2027.
Alonso was seen deep in conversation with team principal Newey in the Aston Martin motorhome on Sunday night after the Dutch GP, and will likely be holding talks with owner Lawrence Stroll in this gap to discuss his future.
There is a lot riding on Honda making gains - both the team's results this year and what Alonso does next.
- JON NOBLE
No comments:
Post a Comment