Alonso: Aston upgrade is only a first step

Fernando Alonso says Aston Martin’s first major upgrade of the season at the Hungarian Grand Prix will matter more for what it reveals about the team’s development direction than for any immediate jump up the order.

Ahead of the Budapest weekend, Alonso made clear that Aston Martin is trying to recover from months of lost ground rather than expecting a breakthrough from one package. He said rival teams spent the opening 12 races adding roughly two to three tenths every two or three events, which became about one to 1.5 seconds by race 10 or 12, while Aston Martin “fell a little bit behind everyone else on the grid.” The team instead chose to bring one larger package, the first significant development of its AMR26 this year.

That deficit is why Alonso cautioned against treating the Hungary update as a miracle cure. He pointed to Silverstone and Spa as especially difficult weekends and said the scale of the gap at Spa showed the limits of any single upgrade. “We had the guy in front of us 2.1 seconds ahead,” Alonso said in the FIA press conference. “There is no package in the world that will give you that amount of time, and probably the position would not change if you ran the updated car in Spa one week ago.”

Instead, Alonso said the real target is to understand whether Aston Martin has finally found the correct technical path. “We need to understand if we are finally on the right path,” he said, adding that Budapest may offer a fairer first read because power “is not the most important point here.” Aston Martin is updating the car this weekend, but not the engine yet.

He linked the current package to issues the team identified as early as the Bahrain test, when Aston Martin realized it had to “fix a few weaknesses on the car.” Alonso described Hungary as “the first step towards those fixes,” with more changes still to come.

Alonso also explained why Aston Martin’s development process had gone astray. In the past, he said, driver feedback and factory data did not always point in the same direction, particularly when aerodynamic behavior on track was not matching expectations. In those situations, “data” sometimes won the argument. He said Adrian Newey’s value is that he works differently.

“Adrian is the type of designer who listens to both sides: data, for sure, but also what the drivers feel,” Alonso said. “That’s why data is not 100% the truth. I think you need to combine both things.”

For Alonso, that is the bigger significance of Aston Martin’s Hungary package. The result on Sunday may not transform the team’s natural position, but if the update confirms the car is finally moving in the right direction, it would mark the first real sign that Aston Martin’s recovery under Newey has begun. Alonso said he has “zero doubts” Newey will “provide the best car on the grid sooner or later.”