Racing
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Fernando Alonso says Aston Martin’s gearbox problem is serious enough that the team may not even be able to race in Monaco if its Miami-style downshift fault returns.
Speaking ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix, the Aston Martin driver said the team has “struggled with the gearbox since Miami” and warned that the issue becomes far more dangerous on a street circuit defined by slow corners and heavy braking zones. “Monaco is not the place to have a random downshift,” Alonso said. “You will have rear locking or pushing, and then you will crash into the wall, and the driver will look stupid, but we are a passenger sometimes.”
He said Aston Martin believed it had moved in the right direction in Canada after two weeks of work on the problem, but Monaco would provide the real answer. “We made a step in the right direction in Canada, and Monaco will tell the truth,” Alonso said. “If you have the downshift problem like we had in Miami, probably we cannot even race, because we will crash in one of the braking points due to a very different downshift type.”
Lance Stroll then underlined why Monaco could punish the same weakness even more severely. In Thursday’s Monaco press conference, the Aston Martin driver said the car loses gear synchronization every time it drops below about 40 km/h. “Every time we’re under like 40km/h, we lose sync of the gears,” Stroll said. “So we have to re-sync gears.”
That matters most at the Grand Hotel hairpin, Monaco’s slowest corner. Stroll said the problem improved slightly in Canada, but added that in Monaco “every time we pass the hairpin we end up losing gear synchronization,” which costs “a lot of time” on each lap.
The issue sits at the heart of Aston Martin’s 2026 package. After using Mercedes’ gearbox-inclusive powertrain supply through 2025, the team switched to its own gearbox with Honda power for 2026. Both Stroll’s explanation and the wider team picture point to a difficult integration problem between the in-house transmission and the power unit, a more delicate task under the current rules because the gearbox has to work in close sync with both the combustion engine and an electric component worth around 475 horsepower.
That makes Monaco more than a difficult weekend for outright pace. It becomes a test of whether Aston Martin can control a basic drivability problem on a circuit where low-speed rotation, clean downshifts and confidence under braking are non-negotiable.
The risk for Aston Martin is that Monaco, a race that can sometimes open opportunities for struggling teams, instead exposes one of the AMR26’s core weaknesses. Alonso said the team is already “too far away” from the top 10 and has no performance updates for this weekend, leaving the gearbox issue as the problem that could define whether Aston Martin can compete at all.