Alonso ‘at peace’ with Aston’s ‘wait for big gains’ upgrade strategy

Fernando Alonso has made it clear that Aston Martin’s struggling 2026 campaign will not be rescued by chasing tiny gains race after race – and he fully supports the team’s decision to resist the temptation of rolling out small upgrades until the car’s deeper problems are solved.

While rivals arrived in Miami armed with fresh aerodynamic packages and performance tweaks, Aston Martin stood still on outright pace, instead directing its attention toward curing the reliability and drivability problems that have crippled its Honda-powered AMR26 since the opening rounds of the season.

The Silverstone-based squad finally managed to eliminate the severe engine vibration issues that had plagued the car, but fresh complications quickly surfaced through persistent gearbox and shifting problems across the Miami weekend.

For Alonso, however, there is little point in throwing development parts at a fundamentally flawed package until Aston Martin fully understands where the car’s real potential lies.

Small upgrades ‘won’t change our position’

The two-time world champion delivered a blunt assessment of the team’s current reality, insisting Aston Martin must think long-term rather than waste precious resources chasing marginal gains that would barely move the car up the order.

“I'm at peace because I understand the situation,” Alonso said. “The team explained to me that if we bring one or two tenths every race, it doesn't change our position, we are P20 or P19 and the next car is one second in front.

“So, even if we bring two tenths every race, it doesn't change our position and it's a huge stress in the system, in the budget cap and things like that. Until we don't have one second and a half or two second improvement, it's better not to press the button in production because we waste money.”

The comments underline the scale of Aston Martin’s current challenge. Despite the anticipation surrounding Adrian Newey’s influence on the car concept, the team is still working to unlock and even properly understand the package it currently has.

That has forced Aston Martin into a far more calculated approach — prioritising stability, clean data collection, and operational consistency before committing to expensive development pushes.

Reliability first as Aston targets gearbox fixes

Although progress was finally made with the Honda engine vibrations in Miami, with both cars crossing the checkered flag on race day, Alonso admitted the next major concern now centers around the gearbox and electronic systems controlling shifts.

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“It was more the gearbox the whole weekend than the engine, so I don't know, the electronics, something,” he said after the Miami GP.

“It was very weird on the downshifts and the upshifts, so not very well in control, so yeah, that's the fix number one for Canada.

“I think with all these heavy braking [zones] in Canada, we need to improve the gearbox behaviour at the moment.”

The timing could hardly be worse for Aston Martin, with the demanding stop-start nature of the Canadian circuit likely to expose any lingering weaknesses in the car’s shifting behaviour.

“I think we are all relaxed, we are all committed to after summer having a better second half of the year and let's see if we can do that,” the Spaniard concluded.

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