Honda is under pressure
“Lovely car to drive“. At the end of the Dutch GP in Zandvoort, the honeymoon began between Fernando Alonso and Adrian Newey. The Spanish driver achieved a golden ninth place and the aerodynamics wizard highlighted how much it can boost the morale of the entire team working at the factory in Silverstone.
Two assets of the recently built trident of wonders by Lawrence Stroll are starting to ‘click’, the Honda power unit is still missing from the lineup, which brought the long-awaited ‘Spec 2’ to Zandvoort. Shintaro Orihara pointed out that there were no reliability issues, but often when this aspect is highlighted it is because from a performance point of view an acceptable level has not yet been reached.
If at the start of the season it was not intellectually honest on Adrian Newey’s part to place all the blame for the flop on the power unit’s performance, now Aston Martin from a chassis point of view has returned to being an F1 car and not an F2 car. Now it’s up to the engine to make the same step, but apparently Lawrence Stroll does not seem ready to wait too long.
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The visit – not the first during the year – of Toto Wolff on Sunday morning in Zandvoort to the Aston Martin motorhome (he stayed for about an hour) did not go unnoticed. According to the Spanish outlet sport.es, a potential negotiation for a sensational return of Aston Martin to the Mercedes power unit starting from 2028 cannot be ruled out. Aston Martin has obtained an exclusive supply agreement from Honda covering the entire regulatory cycle until 2030, but if Honda does not reach a level of competitiveness similar to that which contributed to the Red Bull-Verstappen cycle from 2021 to 2024, sudden upheavals are logically to be expected.
The obstacles are not lacking
Mercedes, however, has ‘replaced’ Aston Martin with Alpine regarding the range of customer teams. The road therefore seems rather uphill, but the Stroll-Wolff axis can also simply be a strategy implemented by Aston Martin to put as much pressure as possible on Honda in the chase for the performance of the other power units.
