The upgraded Honda power unit was supposed to be the thing that rescued Aston Martin's season. It ran for the first time in anger on Friday at Zandvoort. Fernando Alonso ended the day 22nd and last on the Sprint grid; Lance Stroll was 19th.
Practice had suggested otherwise — Alonso was 12th in the only hour of running. Sprint Qualifying went differently. He locked up into Turn 1, took a trip through the gravel, and then had to find a lap time on flat-spotted rubber.
"Free practice was more or less ok, but in qualifying, we had problems on the engine drivability," Alonso told Crash.net. "It was pushing under braking, so it was difficult to stop the car sometimes because the engine was overdelivering. Then, apparently, the SLM [straight line mode] didn't work for me, so I could not open the rear wing."
Losing Straight Line Mode in 2026 is not the modest penalty that losing DRS once was — it disrupts the energy deployment strategy across the entire lap, which explains some of the size of the deficit.
Alonso stopped short of condemning the engine. "It's still very early days and [the PU] is probably a bit immature with all of the controls," he said. "It's a sprint weekend. On a normal weekend, we have three practice sessions to nail the package."
The complication sits in the other garage. Stroll's rear wing worked. He was still roughly seven tenths short of SQ2, and he reached for the same word Alonso had.
"I think there was more there today. We were struggling with the driveability, and there were a few other things that weren't quite right, so we need to understand why," Stroll said. "It's really windy out there, but it's the same for everyone. We'll go through everything tonight, look at the data, and try to make some improvements for tomorrow."
Josh Suttill of The Race drew the same line, measuring Friday against Hungary — where a chassis upgrade had carried Alonso out of Q1 for the first time in 2026. Suttill noted that Stroll, "whose straight mode was working, was still nearly seven tenths from making it into Q2", and set out the question the team now faces: how many of the driveability problems Honda can iron out, given that a Hungaroring filming day aside, this is the first time the package has been properly tested.
Formula 1's own account of the session recorded that hopes had been high after Alonso's practice showing, and that Stroll "did not fare much better, unable to extract enough pace to challenge for SQ2".
Alonso's defence is a real one and he made it unprompted: an engine's control software cannot be calibrated in sixty minutes, and a Sprint weekend offers nothing more. Honda gets a Sprint race and a second qualifying session to demonstrate that this is a software problem and not a trait.
Aston Martin also brought new floor elements and revised front wing endplates. Friday told them nothing about either.