Honda has confirmed a meaningful step forward in its 2026 campaign after Miami became the first race weekend of the year where its partnership with Aston Martin actually looked like a going concern.
Both Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll crossed the finish line, the first time all season Aston Martin had seen both cars make it to the checkered flag, and with that baseline finally established, Honda’s engineers say their attention is turning to performance over reliability.
The opening stretch of 2026 had been pretty brutal for the Silverstone outfit. Just one classified finish across the first three races, with Honda’s power unit at the centre of the problems as vibrations hammered both the AMR26 chassis and its drivers.
The vibrations were severe enough to knock out multiple batteries and even raise health concerns for the drivers’ hands and arms.
Honda addressed the issue source-first rather than symptom-first, leaving one of the AMR26s at the Sakura factory after the Japanese GP for more extensive dyno bench testing rather than shipping it straight back to Silverstone.
When asked in Miami if the vibrations had been reduced or eliminated entirely, Alonso’s had good news: “Gone. I would say gone.”
Honda Already Has Leads on What Comes Next
Honda’s trackside general manager and chief engineer Shintaro Orihara welcomed the Florida result.
“After the Japanese Grand Prix, I mentioned that HRC and Aston Martin had worked very hard to bring countermeasures to Miami,” he said via NextGen-Auto. “We have confirmed that they are working well and I would also say that the drivers have given us positive feedback, which is good progress for Aston Martin and Honda.”
He added that the cars were able to complete full race distance and sprint “without any major reliability issues.
“The vibrations originated from the engine, but were reproduced in the chassis,” he said.
With reliability now secured, Orihara can focus on the next steps: “The next point of focus is that we can concentrate on optimizing our settings for energy management as well as on handling. There is still a lot of room to improve our current power unit with these tools. That’s the next step.”
Software parameters allow more development freedom than hardware at this stage, though that window will also close as the season progresses, meaning each intervention needs careful planning. But Honda is already preparing something more substantial.
Orihara has confirmed that “we won’t see major performance changes until the ADUO.” But this catch-up mechanism for power unit manufacturers who have fallen behind, will reward them with solid performance development opportunities.
Power units are evaluated after the sixth, 12th, and 18th grands prix, with manufacturers more than four percent adrift entitled to two additional upgrades.
Given that the Japanese marque is experiencing a serious deficit so far this season, it’s highly likely that they will be included in this practice.
Because of this, development work at Sakura has pressed ahead, and when asked whether Honda already has a direction for the hardware improvements, Orihara confirmed: “We already have some leads, indeed.”
Aston Martin is expected to bring performance upgrades over the summer period, but with the marque finally getting to the bottom of its early-season woes, it’s in a very different situation to the one that existed mere months ago.
