Alonso says Aston Martin unlikely to improve until Formula One's second half

Fernando Alonso’s verdict on Aston Martin was blunt and bruising: the team’s 2026 turnaround, long sold as a championship-scale reset, looked unlikely to arrive before Formula One’s second half. After four rounds, Aston Martin sat at the foot of the standings with Cadillac, and neither Alonso nor Lance Stroll had scored a point or even escaped Q1 in qualifying.

The problem went beyond slow lap times. In Melbourne, Adrian Newey warned that the car’s violent vibrations could expose both drivers to permanent nerve damage if they were forced to run too long. That warning, delivered before the Australian Grand Prix, made it clear Aston Martin’s issue was not just balance or setup, but a serious mechanical flaw that could compromise reliability, comfort and driver confidence at the same time.

Miami offered little evidence of a recovery. At the Miami International Autodrome, Alonso qualified 18th and Stroll 19th for the Grand Prix, while the sprint shootout left them last again, at 21st and 22nd. In the race weekend, both cars finished a lap down. Honda said on May 1 that it had made progress on reducing vibrations and would bring further countermeasures to Miami, but the admission also showed the team was still fighting a hardware problem rather than refining a competitive package.

That is a harsh landing for a project that had been framed as Aston Martin’s long-awaited leap forward. The AMR26 was unveiled in February as Adrian Newey’s first design for the team, launched with a new livery event in Dhahran, and it arrived alongside a new works partnership with Honda after Aston Martin had relied on Mercedes power units since 2021. In Tokyo, the team and Honda marked the start of that relationship as a cornerstone of a future title challenge. Instead, the opening months of 2026 have exposed how much must still go right before that vision becomes reality.

Alonso’s own future now tracks the team’s uncertainty. He said in 2025 that “if the car goes well, 2026 will probably be my last year,” but on April 30 he said he was “open to everything” and would not decide before the summer break at the end of July. That shift tells its own story: Aston Martin’s reset year was supposed to answer questions about Alonso’s last act, not reopen them. The team’s 2025 season ended with Alonso’s fifth place in Hungary as its nearest podium chance, a reminder of how sharply the project has slipped. For now, Aston Martin is not chasing trophies. It is trying to make the car bearable enough to survive until the upgrades can matter.