Fernando Alonso had barely settled into Aston Martin’s afternoon programme in Bahrain before the AMR26 became garage art, parked up with less than an hour gone on the penultimate day of pre-season testing. That snapshot — Alonso standing off to the side, the car stranded behind him — has become an uncomfortable early symbol of Honda’s return to Formula 1 as a full-time power unit supplier in 2026: ambitious, high-profile, and immediately up against the realities of the new era.
Honda is back on the grid in two distinct ways this season. It continues to support Red Bull’s operation running the rebranded Honda units through Red Bull Powertrains, but the headline project is its works-style partnership with Aston Martin. And in a paddock where first impressions harden quickly, the opening week hasn’t been kind.
Aston Martin arrived late to the behind-closed-doors shakedown and didn’t get much meaningful mileage in. Bahrain was supposed to be the reset — the first proper chance to bank laps, validate systems and let the Alonso-Lance Stroll side of the garage start building rhythm around a brand-new package. Instead, “niggles” became the theme, culminating in Honda calling time early on the final morning of the test.
Honda’s own statement was unusually blunt about the nature of the issue and the knock-on effect it caused. Alonso’s Thursday running revealed a battery-related problem that derailed the plan, prompting bench simulations at HRC Sakura. Compounding that was a shortage of power unit parts — never what you want to hear in an inaugural test, when the entire point is to discover what breaks and then fix it quickly enough to go again.
“Due to this and a shortage of power unit parts, we have adapted today’s run plan to be very limited and consist only of short stints,” Honda said.
The lap count underlined the scale of the disruption. Mercedes, the most industrious team across the three days, racked up 432 laps. Aston Martin managed 128. In testing, mileage isn’t everything — but when you’re integrating a new works power unit under new regulations, it’s close to the next best thing. You can’t learn what you haven’t run, and you can’t tune what you haven’t stressed.
Behind the scenes, Honda is framing its early struggles as the inevitable cost of coming back into a game that has changed while it was away. Tetsushi Tsunoda, who oversees power unit development at Honda Racing Corporation, has pointed to what he calls a “double handicap” for the company as it ramps up to full competitiveness.
The first part is timing. Honda confirmed its commitment to the 2026 rules set in late 2022 — a year later than some of its rivals — and Tsunoda admits the delay mattered.
“Of course, it is a handicap that the start was delayed due to the lack of full-scale development until the announcement of our return,” he said.
The second part is structural, and arguably more important over the long haul: the engine cost cap. In previous eras, manufacturers could brute-force development by throwing bodies and money at parallel concepts until something stuck. That approach is now curtailed by the 2023 introduction of the power unit cost cap — and the uncomfortable irony for Honda is that others had a head start before those financial restrictions fully bit.
“This time there is a cost cap, so it’s different from before,” Tsunoda explained. “In the past, the company could be serious and concentrate its resources… but now it is not easy.
“You can’t spread a lot of seeds… Other manufacturers did not have a cost cap until 2022, so they were able to sow a lot of seeds in the period until then, but from 2023, when we announced our return, a new cost cap system was introduced for power unit manufacturers, and they were not able to sow seeds freely.”
It’s a revealing choice of words. “Seeds” is R&D shorthand: alternative combustion ideas, packaging routes, thermal solutions, electrical strategies — the sort of development scattergun that used to separate the fastest learners from the also-rans. Honda is effectively saying it has had to be more selective, earlier, and with less margin for dead ends. That’s manageable if you choose well. It’s punishing if you don’t, because the regulation framework now makes late-course corrections slower and more expensive in opportunity cost, even if the raw spend is capped.
None of that, though, will comfort Aston Martin in the short term. A works relationship is supposed to buy you integration, influence and tailored packaging — not a reduced test plan made up of short stints because the parts supply won’t support anything more ambitious. And for Alonso, there’s an unavoidable sense of history hovering around the garage whenever Honda reliability becomes the story.
Honda, to be fair, has earned some credit in recent F1 memory for persistence. It climbed out of the well-publicised low point of 2015 and, through years of hard graft, ended up powering a title win in 2021. Tsunoda even referenced the painful, iterative nature of those gains, describing how a key performance breakthrough — “high-speed combustion” — arrived during 2017, only to bring its own compromises until it was fully realised in 2018.
That’s the subtext of Honda’s message now: don’t mistake early turbulence for the final picture. In the context of the 2026 reset, it’s a plausible argument. The problem is that modern F1 is less patient than the engineering timeline wants it to be, and the cost cap removes some of the old escape routes.
For Aston Martin, the immediate task is simple and unglamorous: get the car running, get the system stable, and start building a baseline it can trust. For Honda, this is the moment where the rhetoric about handicaps has to give way to execution — because when the lights go out for the first race of 2026, nobody in the paddock will be grading on a curve.
