Fernando Alonso Says Honda Progresses Before Miami With 2026 Countermeasures
fernando alonso says Aston Martin and Honda have worked through a long, intense break with Miami next on the schedule, and the team believes it has made enough progress to bring further countermeasures to the race. The focus is still on reducing engine vibrations and lifting reliability, two issues that have already limited Aston Martin’s opening races in 2026.
Honda Work Before Miami
Shintaro Orihara said Honda kept one of the AMR26 cars on site for static testing in Sakura during the five-week break, with the work centered on vibrations and reliability. He also said the latest changes would not show up as a visible jump in power unit performance on track, so Miami is about getting the package to run cleaner rather than chasing a dramatic step in speed.
“It has been a long but intense period between the races with lots of work happening in collaboration with the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team both in Japan and in the UK,” Orihara said. He added that the Japanese Grand Prix showed the work was moving “in the right direction” and that Honda had made progress allowing “further countermeasures in Miami and later in the season.”
Alonso And Stroll Struggles
Aston Martin’s first three rounds left the team with little to show on the results sheet. The AMR26 package was slow and unreliable, and Alonso and Lance Stroll were limited by severe vibrations in Australia and China before Alonso finished 18th in Japan, which was Aston Martin’s only classified race result before Miami.
Alonso said the team had been pushing hard to solve the issue, and he split the work between Silverstone and Sakura. “I think [at Aston Martin’s factory] in Silverstone, about the aero performance, we think that there is pace to unlock there, and [at Honda’s headquarters] in Sakura it’s about two things: reliability and vibrations, and also performance,” he said. He also said the Miami fixes should bring “some solutions for the vibrations and the reliability,” with the next step expected to be performance.
Aston Martin’s Opening Test
The stakes are plain for a team that has only once been classified at the end of a race before Miami. Honda and Aston Martin entered a new works partnership for the 2026 season, and the early running has already shown how fragile the package can be when vibrations creep in.
Alonso’s 18th-place finish in Japan is the lone full data point from a race finish, and that makes the Miami update the first real chance to show whether the work in Japan and the UK has shifted the car from surviving sessions to completing races. If the new countermeasures hold, Aston Martin gets a cleaner baseline to build on; if they do not, the same vibration issue will keep swallowing weekends before speed even becomes the conversation.
