Against all logic, Adrian Newey, Aston Martin (and of course Fernando Alonso) face a massive problem with the 2026 Honda F1 power unit. What went wrong? And – with the internet now rife with rumours about a new “Team Principal” – could the issue have been avoided?
In conversation with @Cameron-Cc, Peter in this video offers his thoughts.
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18 Comments
What went wrong? Alonso/Honda curse. Newey not being suited to team principle role. Lame new engine rules. Practically the entirety of Honda's engine department left the engine project before Aston got Honda back into the sport, so Aston are stuck with a bunch of out of their depth kids
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Very informed points Peter ..!
PS : Lawrence "If Your Listening"…..
2 weeks after Peter crowed that Aston’s disastrous testing was a nothingburger 😅
They made their own gearbox.
Boomers doing boomer stuff…
A team with a geriatric Alonso and the lucky sperm slowpoke as drivers is not really a serious team
Stroll doesn’t have time to run the team
As I understand it, no one from Aston bothered to find out if Honda had an engine division, until November. That's a failure to do due diligence.
Aston shot themselves in the foot.
While the durability of the battery assembly is a Honda only issue, I just don’t believe the vibration problem is a wholly Honda problem.
NVH is a dynamic of the ‘whole system’.
The chassis and gearbox are both bolted directly to the PU and absolutely have both a part to play in how the harmonics play out – but also how they are generated. And if Newey and the Aston engineers don’t think they may be part of the cause – but even more importantly, that they can be part of the solution – then the project is absolutely doomed to failure.
That’s how McLaren got it wrong and Torro Rosso got it right.
Imagine where they could be had they stuck with Mercedes.
Honda’s history almost dictated there would be years of PU trouble. Stroll has no one to blame though but himself.
So Lawrence Stroll is a hands on team owner, just not a very good one. Usually in a failure of this magnitude heads need to role. Someone in the Aston Martin organization needs to go because Aston didn’t do its supervisory diligence and let Honda produce a dreadfully inadequate power unit. Likewise someone in Honda should be out the door for failing so badly at providing a competitive unit. That’s why corporate leadership gets paid their disproportionately massive salaries.
Honda went wrong, it is wild people try to blame Newey. Honda has tried something, maybe in response to the Mercedes compression rumors; maybe crank shenanigans or peculiar dwell to get more compression, or mounted the generator offset/asymmetrical… the chassis does not generate vibrations. No blind spot for Newey, there is no reason to expect him to somehow micromanage an engine department – that is absurd.
Having said that, there is this:
there was a slow motion camera shot of the rear of the RBR cresting a hill (Zandvoort?), shown in a series of shots with the other cars.
The RBR was different: the exhaust was clearly bouncing around, "loose".
I think he was/is using the exhaust manifold as a kinetic damper. Hence no porpoising.
If he carried this over, and Honda built an unbalanced pu, unaccounted for harmonics from the vibration may be accentuated by a "floating kinetic damper" design.
Which, one might blame on Newey, but again the chassis is not generating vibration. It is not a kart suspension. This is on Honda.
Well there's no way the engine is causing vibrations. Could be the Regeneration electric motor, but I think it's something to do with aerodynamics the exhaust, like a blown diffuser. it sounds weird that engine I think there's some turbulence what they're looking for but they've created some sound vibrations can cause the vibration, what do you think? Definitely not the engine.
I still find Cameron annoying.
Christian Horner would be the perfect choice to make the team even more unlikable than it already is.
Seidel new TP?
Andy Cowell is the man in-charge of the works collaboration with Honda, he is THE powertrains man, that was what he was poached from Mercedes for. We now know Aston Martin only knew about the shambles that was the Honda situation in November, AT BY THE END OF THE SAME MONTH IN NOVEMBER THEY MADE NEWEY REPLACE COWELL AS TEAM PRINCIPAL??? Then this year, we hear murmurs that Cowell is heading for the door. Doesn't all of this point to Andy Cowell, not Adrian Newey, that screwed all of this up for AMR26? I don't understand how ALL OF THIS escapes journalists whose full time job is to make sense of all this rather than print lazy headlines. Also, for some reason people and the media would rather attribute this to Newey's poor management (which obviously deserves criticism), than to attribute this unbelievable level of incompetence by Honda to have 30% of their prior manpower? I genuinely don't understand this desire to dump all blame, both Honda's and Cowell's, onto Newey.