Fernando Alonso’s Australian Grand Prix was over almost as quickly as it began, which is saying something given he started 17th and still managed to give Aston Martin a fleeting glimpse of relevance in the opening corners.
A rocket launch off the line in Melbourne fired the Honda-powered AMR26 up to 10th, and for two laps Alonso looked like he’d stumbled into a race he hadn’t been invited to. While several cars around him seemed to hesitate as they wrestled with deployment and traction off the grid, Alonso’s getaway was clean enough to briefly flatter a package that, by his own admission, isn’t close to being in a healthy operating window yet.
“Definitely, I think the start and the first two laps were the most enjoyable part of the race,” Alonso said afterwards. “P10 for two laps was unexpected… for us it was a clean first lap.”
Reality arrived the moment the field sorted itself out. Alonso slipped back to where the Aston more naturally belonged on outright pace, falling to 17th as the faster cars resumed normal service. And then the race unraveled in a way that spoke less to performance deficit and more to a team simply trying to keep its weekend alive.
On lap 15, Alonso peeled into the garage and sat there long enough to trigger the usual paddock speculation. Aston Martin’s initial message was that the team had made “some adjustments” and that Alonso would rejoin. He did — 11 laps down, effectively out of the race — only to return to the pitlane soon after and retire, the team citing the need to “conserve components”.
With Alonso having mentioned during the build-up to Melbourne that he’d experienced his hands going “a little bit numb” during testing after around 25 minutes in the car, the extended stop inevitably invited a narrative: was he taking a breather, literally, to get feeling back? Alonso shut that down. The interruption, he insisted, was caused by two separate car issues, neither of them the physical discomfort story people wanted to tell.
“We had a small issue on data that we had to stop the car,” he explained. “We thought we’d repaired it and then we went back out again, and I think another issue appeared so we had to stop the car for a second time.”
That’s not the sort of sequence any team wants in the opening round of a new era, but it’s particularly awkward for a project still trying to stitch together a new partnership with Honda. Melbourne was already a difficult Sunday for Aston Martin: Lance Stroll ended up 11 laps down, and both cars spent time being worked on mid-race. Even allowing for the chaos that tends to follow a season opener, that’s a heavy hit to mileage at exactly the moment the team needs clean laps to understand what it has.
And then there’s the other problem Alonso can’t ignore, even if it wasn’t the reason his race collapsed: the vibrations.
They were an issue in Bahrain, they were still there in Australia, and Alonso’s description suggests this isn’t a minor annoyance that can be tuned out with set-up tweaks. The sensation inside the cockpit, he said, felt the same as the earlier running — unpleasant, persistent, and not yet properly isolated from the chassis.
“This is not the best feeling driving with this level of vibration,” Alonso said. While Honda believes it has reduced vibration “on the battery” since Bahrain through modifications, Alonso’s point was blunt: it hasn’t translated to the car the driver sits in.
“They need to isolate the battery in a different way,” he added. “I think it will take a little bit more time.”
This is the part that will concern Aston Martin most, because vibration problems aren’t just about comfort. In a sport where teams live on sensor confidence and component life modelling, anything that blurs the data picture or accelerates wear becomes a multiplier. It also feeds directly into Alonso’s other theme from Melbourne: Aston Martin simply isn’t running enough to optimise anything.
“In the package in general, I think we are not optimised in anything yet because of the lack of mileage,” he said.
That’s a loaded sentence coming from Alonso, because he rarely wastes words. If you’re not optimised in anything after the first race, you’re not merely chasing lap time — you’re still trying to establish a baseline you can trust, while the rest of the grid is already refining.
There was little appetite from Alonso to dress up the immediate future, either. Asked whether the situation might look different next weekend in China, he didn’t offer the usual “different track, different conditions” comfort blanket.
“No different, we have the same car, the same power unit next weekend. So I expect another tough weekend,” he said.
The only upside, such as it is, is that a tough weekend still counts as an opportunity if it comes with laps. Aston Martin’s priority now is unglamorous: stop the stop-start. Fix what keeps forcing them into the garage, keep the car on track long enough to learn from it, and then worry about whether the AMR26 can fight where Alonso briefly placed it on Sunday — in the top 10 — for more than two laps.
Melbourne gave Alonso a tiny highlight reel at lights out. Everything after that was a reminder that in 2026, Aston Martin and Honda still have plenty of basic work to do before the interesting questions even start.
