Fernando Alonso didn’t try to dress it up in Melbourne: Aston Martin’s new AMR26 has spent more time looking fragile than fearsome so far, and the stopwatch isn’t offering any comfort either. Yet the two-time world champion walked away from qualifying insisting the car still contains “huge potential” — and, perhaps more revealingly, that the team is now throwing people at Honda’s problems as well as its own.
That’s where Aston Martin’s weekend has landed after a messy build-up. Limited running across the event has left the squad chasing its tail, first because it simply didn’t have enough spare batteries to rotate through the programme, then because a vibration issue made it difficult to string together consecutive long runs. In modern F1 that’s effectively the worst of both worlds: you can’t build confidence in the car, and you can’t gather clean, consistent data to understand it.
Saturday, in particular, was bruising. Lance Stroll didn’t turn a lap in FP3 or qualifying, leaving one side of the garage dead in the water. Alonso at least got the car on the grid — 17th — which tells you plenty about where Aston Martin is right now, but also offered a small psychological release in a paddock that measures optimism in tenths.
“It doesn’t change anything,” Alonso said, when asked whether being able to fight around other cars rather than sit at the back had shifted the mood. “But it made us change a little bit in the garage.”
That line carried the subtext of a team that’s already had to dig deep this season. Alonso pointed to the mechanics “working flat out” and changing power units “day and night” over the last six weeks — not the sort of phrase you hear from a happy camp in March. Even with Stroll’s lost day, simply being in the mix on track was, in his words, “a little bit better than being dead last, as we were yesterday.”
There’s a hard edge to Alonso’s view of what his job is right now. He talked about morale as something the drivers have to actively manage, not a by-product of performance.
“Maybe that’s enough to ignite a little bit of motivation in everyone in the garage,” he said. “That’s probably part of our job now as the drivers, to keep the morale of the team high in difficult moments.”
The more interesting part came when Alonso widened the lens beyond Aston Martin’s own car issues and into the partnership with Honda. He was blunt: the power isn’t where it needs to be, and it isn’t a quick fix. But he also revealed the team is allocating resources to help Honda resolve its issues as quickly as possible — an unusually candid admission of how intertwined the project has become.
“The power unit is what it is,” Alonso said. “We know that we are down on power. There is a deficit on power, and that will be more difficult to resolve, but we try to help Honda in that regard. I think a lot of resources from Aston Martin as well are switching to Honda to improve the situation and to help them.
“We are one team. We help each other, and we try to face this challenge all together and find the solutions in the short term.”
That’s not just corporate togetherness; it’s a statement about urgency. When a team starts shifting people across organisational boundaries this early, it’s because the usual channels aren’t moving fast enough — and because the competitive cost of waiting is too high. Every limited session now compounds into a season-long handicap, especially when you’re trying to stabilise a new car that, by Alonso’s own description, can’t yet be trusted to behave the same way from one day to the next.
“There is, for sure, huge potential on the car,” he insisted. “We just need more laps, we just need more consistency, and it seems very fragile at the moment, as car 18 shows, that is depending on the day.”
It’s a classic Alonso diagnosis: the core concept might be sound, but the operating window is narrow and the team isn’t accessing it reliably. That’s not a comforting place to be heading into a grand prix, particularly with one car compromised before the lights even go out. Still, if there was a sliver of positivity for Aston Martin after a ragged Saturday, it was that Alonso managed to give the factory — and the trackside crew — something tangible to cling to: evidence that the AMR26 can at least run in company, rather than circulate in its own lonely category.
Whether that “huge potential” is a genuine performance ceiling or simply the last useful currency a struggling team can spend in public is something Melbourne will start to answer. But Alonso, as ever, is treating the present pain as a problem of execution rather than a death sentence — and he’s making it clear Aston Martin intends to fight this on every front, even if that means helping build the solution at Honda’s end, too.
