De la Rosa rejects Aston Martin-Honda distance blame

Pedro de la Rosa says the 9,000-9,500km gap between Aston Martin’s Silverstone base and Honda’s Sakura operation is not the reason for the team’s poor start to their new partnership.

Aston Martin has opened the season well off the pace, with de la Rosa saying the car is around four seconds per lap down and among the slowest on the grid. In that context, he argued the explanation cannot be reduced to geography alone. The current package has also been hit by significant engine vibrations, reliability problems and an unimpressive chassis, leaving the team with a broader performance deficit than a simple location issue.

Pedro de la Rosa, Aston Martin team ambassador, told Sky F1 and Sky Sports that the arrangement is not ideal, but insisted it has already been proven to work at championship level. “A lot of our guys are working with Honda closely,” he said. “Ideally, they would be in Silverstone, it would be better, closer to us. But they’re in Japan, and it has worked in the past. They are world champions [with Red Bull]. They won four world championships, working from Sakura.”

Honda’s core power-unit design, development and production work is based in Sakura, while its site near Silverstone is used mainly for post-race maintenance and logistics. That leaves Aston Martin and Honda working across roughly 9,000-9,500km and about an eight-hour time difference, a setup that has become an easy target as the team has slipped toward the back.

De la Rosa’s point was that the scale of Aston Martin’s struggles points to a much wider problem. When a car is this far off the front, he said, the causes come from “many fronts and not only one,” not from a single structural factor.

Instead, he framed the challenge as one of integration under the new regulations. “I don't think that we have to look into these details to find the reason why we're not competitive, because it has worked in the past,” de la Rosa said. “We just have to make sure that we give Honda all the time [needed], all the team to support them and work as one. That’s the process we’re in.”

That leaves Aston Martin’s task clear: not to blame the map, but to build the kind of unified operation Honda previously formed with Red Bull, because the speed of that integration will shape whether this partnership can recover from its difficult opening phase.