Honda’s first proper “hands-on” spell with Aston Martin’s 2026 car has happened away from the cameras and the Friday noise — and, tellingly, it wasn’t about chasing lap time.
During April’s extended break, Honda has been able to keep an AMR26 chassis at Sakura for static testing for the first time, a significant step in a new works partnership that’s already thrown up its first awkward reality: the integration between power unit and chassis has brought persistent vibration issues through the opening three rounds.
Trackside general manager and chief engineer Shintaro Orihara confirmed the Sakura work has been centred on reducing those vibrations, with a clear reliability motive rather than any expectation of immediate performance fireworks. In other words, this is the sort of early-season graft you do because you have to — not because you think it’ll move you up the order overnight.
Fernando Alonso has been the most vivid barometer of the problem. He’s described the steering wheel vibration as severe enough to leave his hands “a little bit numb” after around 25 minutes in the car. That’s not the kind of complaint you file under “driver exaggeration” either; at this level, anything that compromises feel, comfort and repeatability becomes a performance issue by default, even before you get to the longer-term question of what it’s doing to components bolted to a new-generation power unit.
Aston Martin’s season has been grimly modest so far. Suzuka — Honda’s home race — at least produced the team’s first finish of the year, albeit with Alonso only 18th at the flag. But that weekend also underlined why Sakura mattered: once the race was done, Honda took the opportunity to retain one AMR26 on site and run deeper checks, giving its engineers more time with the real packaging, the real interfaces and the real-world symptoms they’re trying to knock out.
Orihara was careful not to sell Miami as a turning point. He talked about progress and “countermeasures” — the kind of language engineers use when they’re battling a problem that doesn’t have one magic fix — while warning fans not to expect “big jumps forward” straight away.
“It has been a long but intense period between the races with lots of work happening in collaboration with the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team both in Japan and in the UK,” Orihara said ahead of the Miami Grand Prix.
“The Japanese Grand Prix showed that the work is going in the right direction and helped us to find the motivation to keep pushing forward.
“After that race, we took the opportunity to keep one of the AMR26 cars on site for further static testing in Sakura for the first time, focusing our efforts on reducing the vibrations and thus increasing reliability.
“We have made some progress, allowing us to implement further countermeasures in Miami and later in the season. Realistically, this progress will not have a visible impact on the power unit performance on track, so we shouldn’t be expecting big jumps forward here.”
That framing matters. In a year when everyone is learning what the 2026 ruleset does to behaviour, cooling demands and energy deployment, the temptation is to treat every update as a step-change. Honda is essentially saying: not this one. This is foundational work — the unglamorous stabilising act that gives a team room to push the rest of the package harder later.
Miami, though, won’t wait for anyone to get comfortable. Orihara pointed out it’s the first stop on the 2026 calendar with a heavy slow-speed emphasis, mixed with two long open-throttle sections — a layout that exposes driveability and makes energy management feel like a live strategic lever rather than background calibration.
“It is a unique track, having two long open-throttle sections, and several slow speed corners,” he said. “This combination makes it interesting to find the car setting compromise.
“On the power unit side, it’s about improving driveability through the slow speed sector and optimising energy management in this section is a key factor to maximise performance.”
There’s another variable this weekend: heat. Miami is set to be the first warm race of the season and, under the new regulations, that brings an immediate focus on keeping temperatures under control. When you’re already chasing vibration and reliability, thermal margins become less of a nice-to-have and more of a survival tactic — particularly in traffic, particularly in a Sprint format where parc fermé constraints and time pressure can magnify small compromises into big headaches.
And yes, it’s a Sprint weekend, which means the usual compression of learning time — but with a twist. With Bahrain and Saudi Arabia cancelled earlier in the season and teams pushing for more meaningful running, FP1 has been extended by 30 minutes. That leaves Miami with a 90-minute opening session, still a single shot at pinning down settings and cooling specifications before Sprint qualifying.
“The Miami Grand Prix is a Sprint weekend which means we only have one practice session – albeit 90 minutes – to optimise all of the data settings under the new regulations and define the best cooling specifications ahead of Sprint qualifying, which makes FP1 here very important,” Orihara said.
For Aston Martin and Honda, the storyline isn’t really about whether Miami suddenly flatters the AMR26. It’s whether the quieter work — the Sakura tests, the incremental countermeasures, the relentless focus on reliability — can get the basics back to a place where Alonso isn’t fighting the steering wheel as much as he’s fighting the clock.
Because if your driver is stepping out of the car with numb hands three races into a new era, you don’t have a “teething issue”. You have a priority.
