Fernando Alonso didn’t sound like a driver hunting for marginal gains in Miami so much as one trying to get his car back into a predictable window.
Aston Martin arrived at the 2026 Miami Grand Prix talking less about lap time and more about finally stamping out the vibrations that had made the AMR26 such an awkward, confidence-sapping thing to lean on. On that front, Alonso says the job’s largely done — but qualifying delivered an unwelcome reminder that when one fire’s out, another can start.
The headline from Alonso’s Q1 exit wasn’t simply that Aston Martin looked short of pace; it was that he reckons the car developed a gearbox-related issue at the worst possible moment, turning a tricky session into something he described as “impossible to drive”.
Front locking has been a recurring theme for Aston Martin this weekend, and it was plain to see when Alonso struggled to get the AMR26 hauled down entering the pit lane at the end of Q1. Asked whether the team had made progress on that specific problem across the weekend, Alonso didn’t bother dressing it up.
“Yeah, it’s bad,” he said.
But, in Alonso’s telling, that wasn’t what killed the lap. The bigger hit came from a transmission behaviour that only surfaced in qualifying, after earlier sessions had appeared clean.
“I think the biggest problem for me, to be honest, in qualifying, was the gearbox,” he explained. “It was for the very first time, because we didn’t have any problem the rest of the sessions this weekend. But now in quali, it was impossible to drive.
“I lost sync in every braking point, so I have no acceleration out of the corners, and the downshifts were all over the place, very random. Sometimes I had push, sometimes I had rear locking. So that was a surprise, bad surprise, in quali.”
In a weekend where the margins are tight and traffic management is already a headache, the last thing any driver wants is a car that changes its mind mid-corner entry. Alonso’s reference to “random downshifts” is particularly ominous because it doesn’t just cost lap time — it undermines the consistency you need to build any kind of rhythm around Miami’s stop-start sections.
And there’s a strategic sting in the tail: Alonso was immediately thinking about the possibility of rain on race day. A gearbox that’s unpredictable under braking in the dry is one thing; add low grip and variable conditions and it becomes an accident waiting to happen.
“So let’s try to understand and fix it for tomorrow, especially if it rains,” he said. “I think we cannot race with this level of random downshifts that we have at the moment.”
The irony is that Aston Martin can at least point to genuine progress elsewhere. The big talking point around the AMR26 through the early part of the season has been persistent vibrations, serious enough that one of the cars remained with Honda after the Japanese Grand Prix so the manufacturer could run checks at Sakura. Alonso’s verdict in Miami was blunt and positive: the vibrations are “gone”.
That matters, not just for reliability, but for how a driver attacks corners. Persistent vibration issues aren’t simply uncomfortable; they mess with braking feel, tyre behaviour and the trust required to push a car to the edge without second-guessing it. Alonso framed it as a box finally ticked — the sort of behind-the-scenes fix that doesn’t make headlines when it works, but dominates your weekends when it doesn’t.
“Yeah, the reliability and the vibrations, they are much better than what it has been so far,” he said. “So that’s the main positive of this weekend. All the vibration work, let’s say we can tick that box, because the car behaves normal now. No issues to finish the race tomorrow. No reliability concerns.”
Normal, however, isn’t fast — not yet. Alonso’s other point was almost as cutting as his gearbox description: Aston Martin brought no new parts to Miami while most rivals turned up after the April break with meaningful upgrade packages.
“In terms of pace, we didn’t bring any part here,” he said, “so yeah, probably we have fallen behind a little bit extra than the last race.”
There was also a stark bit of perspective that will resonate in the paddock. Alonso noted that 17th place was still a second up the road from where he was, which tells you why Aston Martin has been reluctant to spend development capital chasing small gains when the baseline problems were bigger.
It’s a very 2026 way of thinking — not romantic, not particularly inspiring for fans, but brutally practical under the cost cap. Alonso effectively laid out the logic: if the car’s unreliable or fundamentally compromised, spending to find two or three tenths is a poor trade when you can’t consistently convert that into results.
He was asked whether curing the vibrations had been the first critical step, and he didn’t hesitate.
“I think so,” he said. “I think as long as you don’t understand the problems and you don’t fix one at a time, it’s difficult to gain also trust in the next steps into the performance.”
He also acknowledged the psychological grind involved when you arrive at the circuit already aware that the competitive picture isn’t going to transform overnight.
“But obviously, we are racers,” Alonso added. “So when we come here on the weekend and we see that the situation is the same, and it’s going to be the same for the next few months, it’s going to be an exercise of stay calm altogether.”
That’s the balancing act Aston Martin now faces. The vibrations may have been banished — a significant step after the fears earlier in the year that even finishing races could be a struggle — but Miami underlined how quickly progress can be undercut by a fresh failure mode. Fixing the gearbox issue is now non-negotiable simply to have a functional race car.
And once that’s done, the bigger question returns: how long can Aston Martin afford to stand still on upgrades while everyone else keeps moving? Alonso’s comments suggest the team has consciously prioritised making the AMR26 trustworthy first, then worrying about speed. In principle it’s sound. In Formula 1, though, the timing has to be perfect — because “normal” only buys you the right to start chasing the next problem.
