Honda believes the messy reliability story that defined Aston Martin’s early 2026 has finally been put to bed — and, in the bluntest terms possible, the battery drama is “gone”.
After a start to the new regulations that was far more bruising than anyone at Silverstone or Sakura wanted, Honda says the worst of the teething problems have been eliminated, freeing Aston Martin to chase the more familiar lap-time gains: energy management, drivability, and the sort of calibration work that turns a car from merely functional into something a driver can lean on.
The root cause of the early-season headaches was an aggressive vibration issue centred on the battery system. The problem was severe enough to compromise reliability and, crucially, it wasn’t fully understood until the power unit was integrated into the AMR26 in pre-season. Mitigations were rolled out across the opening races, but the breakthrough came when Aston Martin took the unusual step of leaving a chassis in Japan after Suzuka so Honda could work on optimisation with the real-world packaging in front of them, rather than relying purely on test rigs and models.
By Miami, the change in mood was obvious. Both cars reached the end of the Sprint and the Grand Prix — which, given how the season began, counted as progress in itself — and Fernando Alonso even had enough in hand to spend the race trading blows with Cadillac’s Sergio Perez and come out ahead.
Speaking in Montreal ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix weekend, Honda’s Shintaro Orihara didn’t pretend the job is finished, but he made it clear the priority list has been rewritten.
“In Miami, we had a good step on reliability, and the battery issues are, let’s say, now gone,” Orihara said. “Then we now focus on improving the energy management and also driveability; that is the main improvement point for lap time. So we have optimised our data settings for reliability.”
If that sounds like a team exhaling, it is — but it’s not the same as saying Aston Martin is suddenly where it wants to be. The next layer of the problem is subtler and, in some ways, more annoying: the car’s behaviour on corner entry and through the braking phase, where the new-era cars are doing far more recuperation and asking drivers to manage a different blend of engine braking, harvest and stability than they were used to.
In Miami, both Alonso and Lance Stroll ran into axle locking that compromised drivability, and Alonso pointed a finger at the shifting and gearbox behaviour as the next obvious target. Orihara suggested Honda already has a handle on what’s behind it — and the answer is tied directly to what 2026 has changed.
“We have a good understanding of what the problem is or what is causing the drivability issue,” he said. “The unique point is that this year, I would say regulation is changing.
“Engine brake phase operation, load is high, so quite a big difference in operation when comparing to last year, and then we see some unique behaviour in that phase.
“Then we are trying to improve our controllability in that phase.”
That last word — controllability — is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It’s one thing to build peak performance into a package; it’s another to make the car’s responses consistent enough that the driver can repeat them when it matters. And in 2026, with recuperation levels increased and downshifting demands reshaped by the regulations, even teams with stable technical programmes have been forced into a learning curve.
For Aston Martin, there’s another complicating factor: it’s now building its own gearbox for the first time, having previously relied on Mercedes customer hardware. Team boss Mike Krack admitted the “drivability” umbrella is now broader and trickier than it used to be — and that Aston isn’t the only outfit feeling it.
“The whole subject of drivability, including the shifting up or down, is a step more complicated than it used to be, for various reasons,” Krack said. “The regulations have changed quite a lot regarding the downshifting. We are recuperating much, much, much more.
“The load levels are lower, and we are new to that party as well; we must not forget.”
Krack’s point is worth underlining: even if Honda has stabilised the battery side, the next steps are the kind that don’t always show up cleanly on a headline stopwatch. They’re found in the transitions — the way the car sheds speed, the way it hands control back to the driver mid-corner, the way it behaves when the rear wants to rotate but the system is still trying to harvest.
“It is a complex topic that I think we get our head more and more around, also from the fact that we can now do more laps, we can do more running, a lot of issues that we had that prevented us from running are now solved,” Krack added. “New topics pop up, so I think the whole gearbox topic is challenging and will remain challenging.
“We also see across the field, there are a lot of drivers complaining about shifting, and I think it is partly related to the situation, but also, I think we have some work to do.”
There’s a temptation, when a team starts talking about “drivability”, to translate it lazily into a convenient chunk of lap time. Krack wouldn’t play that game, and he’s right not to — because the value isn’t always in a single delta, but in the platform it creates. A calmer braking phase can unlock set-up directions you couldn’t touch before. Cleaner shifts can widen the operating window across tyres and fuel loads. And better energy management can change how aggressively you can deploy over a lap without tripping over your own systems.
When asked to put a number on it, Krack shrugged: he didn’t have one, and he wasn’t going to invent it.
What he did offer, though, was a glimpse of the internal mood after a stop-start opening stretch. With the worst reliability failures now apparently addressed, Aston Martin can finally do what it couldn’t do early on: run, learn, and iterate — the unglamorous loop every team needs before upgrades and “potential” mean anything.
“We had a meeting with the team this morning,” Krack said. “The spirit is very good because we are honest about the situation, and we are aware, and we discuss it.
“So I can only confirm that the spirit with our partner, within the team, is very strong, but for the drivers, it’s very difficult, because they are the most exposed.”
Aston Martin doesn’t need a miracle; it needs continuity. Honda says the foundation is now stable enough to build on. The next question is how quickly that stability turns into something Alonso and Stroll can actually trust when they hit the brakes at the end of a long straight — and whether the team can convert “issues solved” into the only currency that matters in this paddock: lap time.
