Newey has ended up in a nightmare due to a 'horror marriage' with Honda

Anyone who thought they’d heard the worst news after Thursday’s media session was proven wrong on Friday. Newey had already stated on Thursday that Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll could only run a limited number of laps due to vibrations in the chassis. A day later, it seems that running laps at all may become a problem.

“I feel a bit powerless,” is how Newey describes the situation he currently finds himself in at Aston Martin. The Honda engine is the major issue. Although Newey emphasizes that it’s also an Aston Martin problem, the blame is clearly being placed at Honda’s feet.

And the more of the picture you see, the more understandable that becomes. For instance, Aston Martin only discovered in November 2025 that Honda had inexperienced people working on the engine.

Honda pulled the plug on its F1 project, only to decide a year and a half later to build an engine for 2026 after all. It was already known that the staff had left. That Honda would be behind the competition was also expected. What Honda kept from Aston Martin, however, was that the newly hired staff had zero experience in Formula 1.

This has led to the current situation. The problems are hard to count on a single hand. First of all, the engine is causing massive vibrations throughout the chassis. It means everything breaks more quickly, including the drivers’ fingers. Because everything breaks more quickly, less running can be done. That was already the case in Barcelona and Bahrain, and that trend is continuing in Australia.

And now there’s another problem. The batteries are failing too. After one free practice session in which Alonso completed zero laps and Stroll did just three in total, two of the four batteries have already been written off. There are no new batteries available to be flown in, so there is a serious chance that Aston Martin may be unable to run at all from a certain point this weekend.

There’s no quick fix either. First, Honda needs to find the cause of the vibrations before it can come up with a solution. They are nowhere near that point yet. On top of that, there’s hardly any running, which means issues barely come to light.

That snowball is only gaining momentum. The problems lead to few laps, few laps lead to little data, and little data leads to few insights to solve problems.

Meanwhile, the staff in the garage and at the factory are running on fumes. From Thursday to Friday, Aston Martin’s personnel worked long overtime hours. The reward: three laps from Stroll and Alonso not even going out in FP1.

The lack of a quick solution was also evident from another of Newey’s answers. He stated that Honda will have to start early on the 2027 engine because its internal combustion engine is significantly behind the competition.

The sighs in Newey’s responses may have been the clearest signal of Aston Martin’s plight. It seemed like a dream marriage for Aston Martin: a full works deal with Honda and Newey at the helm, who had great success with Honda. It’s starting to look like a nightmare marriage.