Honda’s message to Aston Martin ahead of Montreal is revealing in its simplicity: the obvious mechanical gremlins are finally easing, so now the lap time has to come from the part you can’t bolt on — driver confidence.
After a bruising start to the partnership, Honda says it’s arriving at the Canadian Grand Prix with a clearer handle on the vibration problems that dogged the AMR26 early on. Those oscillations weren’t just an annoyance; they were serious enough to raise concerns about longer-term impact for Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll. But as mileage has piled up and the data picture has sharpened, the issue has “subsided”, and Honda believes it has already banked something tangible.
Shintaro Orihara, Honda’s Trackside General Manager and Chief Engineer, pointed to Miami as the weekend where the team could finally breathe a little easier on the power unit side.
“At the Miami Grand Prix, we confirmed our battery vibration improvements and our overall power unit reliability,” Orihara said. “It was also a key opportunity to learn on the energy management side under the updated 2026 regulations, and this will continue in Canada.
“In Montreal, which is Lance’s home race, we will focus on enhancing the driveability and our energy management strategy to support the drivers in building more confidence.
“In fact, this is an important target of our race weekend. If we can give more confidence to the drivers in entering the corners faster and carrying more speed, then we unlock lap time.”
That last line lands because it’s the crux of Aston Martin’s current reality. When a car has been shaking its drivers’ teeth out for weeks, you don’t just erase that from muscle memory because an engineer says the traces look cleaner. The first job is to get the driver back to committing earlier — braking later, releasing the pedal with certainty, leaning on the rear on entry — without that little mental “what if” that costs hundredths in three corners and turns into tenths by the end of the lap.
Montreal is a particularly unforgiving place to still be rebuilding that trust. It’s heavy braking, sharp changes of direction, and a premium on traction and deployment. If the power unit’s behaviour and the car’s response to it aren’t predictable, you pay twice: once in the corners, and again down the straights when energy use and recovery aren’t optimised because the driver can’t place the car where it needs to be.
Orihara’s mention of energy management under the 2026 rules is also a quiet hint at where Aston and Honda are spending their time. It’s not simply about peak output; it’s about making the whole package feel consistent to the driver over a lap, so the “plan” doesn’t collapse the moment you get a small snap at Turn 2 or a half-lock on the way into the final chicane.
And yet, Alonso’s comments after Miami made it clear the biggest irritant from the cockpit wasn’t necessarily the Honda end of the car.
“No issues,” Alonso said after finishing 15th. “Honestly, it was more the gearbox the whole weekend than the engine, so I don’t know the electronics or something.
“It was very weird on the downshifts and the upshifts, so not very well in control.”
That’s a brutal problem to carry into Canada, where the lap is effectively a sequence of braking events stitched together with short bursts — exactly the kind of circuit where shift quality and stability on decel matter. Alonso even underlined it as the priority.
“So that’s the fix number one for Canada. I think with all these heavy braking in Canada, we need to improve the gearbox behaviour at the moment.
“I think we will make a step on that drivability point of view. Performance, not.”
It’s a telling distinction: “drivability” as a step, “performance” as a separate mountain. In other words, Aston Martin isn’t pretending a clean weekend will suddenly turn it into a threat at the front — not with Alonso openly acknowledging there are no upgrades until after the summer. The near-term objective is more basic, and perhaps more important: get to a place where the drivers can drive the thing properly, and let the lap time come back naturally.
Alonso, never one to sugar-coat the grind, also sounded like a man staring down a stretch of races where the questions won’t change, even if the answers have to.
“Now it’s going to be very tough races. It’s going to feel repetitive,” he said. “Obviously, we need to face the media every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
“You do your job, and we drive fast, but seems repetitive, the message.”
For Honda and Aston Martin, Montreal is less about a headline result and more about proof that the baseline is becoming trustworthy. If the vibration fix is real, and if the drivability work — gearbox behaviour included — gives Stroll and Alonso a car they can lean on under braking and on entry, then Honda’s claim about “unlocking lap time” starts to look less like a slogan and more like the only route back to respectability in the short term.
