Racing
© Liauzh
Honda will introduce its only major 2026 power-unit upgrade for Aston Martin at the Dutch Grand Prix, targeting the team’s biggest weakness in power performance after Aston Martin took just one point from the first 11 races.
The update arrives as the next step in Aston Martin’s attempt to recover a season that had left it near the back of the field for much of the first half. Fernando Alonso’s 10th place in Monaco remains the team’s only point so far, but a major chassis package in Hungary gave Aston Martin its first real lift, with Honda now tasked with adding gains on the engine side.
Shintaro Orihara, Honda’s Formula 1 chief engineer, said the new specification was built around the area Honda sees as its clearest deficit. “Our main weak point is power performance,” Orihara said, adding that Honda focused purely on improving engine performance with the new engine while rebuilding drivability around its changed combustion characteristics.
Honda also worked on reducing friction to improve efficiency, but Orihara said there are no software or ERS changes in this package. The challenge at Zandvoort, then, is not only whether the engine produces more power, but how quickly Aston Martin and Honda can optimize its behavior in real race conditions, particularly for drivability and energy deployment.
Orihara made clear Honda is not selling the new unit as an instant cure. He said the manufacturer has to be “realistic” and “cannot bring a magic update,” even if it believes the package represents a good step forward. In a field as tight as Formula 1, he said, gains of 50 to 100 milliseconds matter, and Honda expects this evolution to deliver that kind of lap-time improvement.
That process has already started. Honda first ran the new-spec power unit in the Aston Martin during a filming day at the Hungaroring at the start of the summer break. Orihara said it completed the full running program without any problems, worked as expected in the updated chassis, and produced useful drivability data that Honda later analyzed on the test bench before arriving in the Netherlands.
Honda’s trackside work through the weekend will center on balancing what the drivers want with what the engine program still needs. Orihara said the factory remains focused on pure engine performance, while engineers at the circuit can tune parameters to improve drivability and energy management from session to session, using feedback from Alonso and Lance Stroll to find lap time.
Honda does not expect a penalty for fitting the new power unit at Zandvoort, and Orihara confirmed this is the only major engine update planned for 2026. That makes the Dutch Grand Prix less a final verdict on the package than the starting point for its race evaluation, and a significant checkpoint for Aston Martin’s second-half recovery before Honda turns its main development attention to 2027.