Honda's Five-Lap Mexico Failure Shows How Far Aston Martin Still Has to Go

Aston Martin’s Honda power unit failed after barely five of the 71 laps of Sunday’s Mexico City Grand Prix at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez. The team left Mexico with nothing to add to its tally of seven points, which keeps it 10th of 11 in the constructors’ championship and ahead only of first-year entrant Cadillac. With four rounds remaining, the failure means more than one lost Sunday. It is the clearest sign yet that the most anticipated new partnership of the 2026 regulations is still working through problems that its rivals solved in pre-season.

Why Mexico punishes a 2026 power unit

Honda saw this coming, at least in general terms. In the team’s pre-race preview, reported by Autosport and Motorsport.com, Honda’s Shintaro Orihara called the circuit “a very challenging track for the power unit”. That was not a routine warning.

Mexico City sits more than 2,200 metres above sea level, and the air there is roughly a fifth less dense than at a sea-level circuit. That has two effects, and they compound each other. The turbocharger has to spin much harder to push the same mass of air into the engine. Every radiator and cooler on the car also rejects heat less efficiently, because less air passes through it to carry the heat away. Teams respond by opening up the bodywork, which costs drag, and by managing temperatures for the whole race.

The 2026 rules make this harder. The MGU-H, which used to recover energy from the turbo and help control its speed, has been removed. The electrical side of the power unit now supplies close to half of the car’s total output, so the battery, the MGU-K and their control electronics are doing far more work than before. They also generate heat that has to be shed through the same thin air. Add the long run from the start line to Turn 1, where deployment and harvesting are both under heavy load, and Mexico tests the thermal and electrical margins of a power unit more severely than almost any other venue on the calendar.

The timing of Sunday’s failure is the most revealing detail.

Five laps is a different kind of problem

A power unit that wilts after 50 laps of heat soak in thin air has run out of margin late in a hard race. That is frustrating, but it suggests a design that is close to where it needs to be and can be fixed with cooling changes or a more conservative operating map. A unit that fails after five laps has barely reached its full operating temperatures. It has not been through anything like the cumulative stress of a full race distance.

That does not reveal the exact cause, but it does say something about how much margin there was going into the race. Honda’s engineers knew Mexico would be extreme, and they had a full weekend of practice and qualifying data from the circuit. If the unit still could not survive the first few laps of the race, then either the margin was thinner than the team believed, or something in the package was already compromised before the start. Neither is reassuring at round 19 of 23.

There is also a practical cost beyond the lost points. Each driver has a limited allocation of power unit elements for the season. Every unit lost this late shrinks the pool available for the final four rounds and increases the risk of grid penalties in races where Aston Martin can least afford to start from the back. Mexico showed what is possible from there: Liam Lawson took the RB from 22nd on the grid to seventh and six points. Aston Martin needs cars that run long enough to try the same thing.

One works team, two cars, not enough miles

Sort the constructors’ table by engine supplier and Honda’s position stands out.

Power unit	Teams	Combined points
Mercedes	Mercedes, McLaren, Alpine, Williams	1,076
Ferrari	Ferrari, Haas, Cadillac	535
Red Bull Ford	Red Bull, RB	490
Audi	Audi	27
Honda	Aston Martin	7

The points totals partly reflect the chassis, and it would be unfair to blame Honda alone for seven points across 19 rounds. Williams, with the dominant Mercedes power unit, has only 12. But the table also shows a structural disadvantage. Mercedes has had eight cars gathering mileage, failure data and operating knowledge every weekend since testing. Ferrari has had six. Honda has had two, at a team whose chassis has rarely run in the kind of clean, representative conditions that let engineers separate power unit faults from everything else.

In a brand-new formula, mileage is the main currency of reliability. Problems that one customer team finds in March are fixed for all of them by May. Honda has no such network. Every lesson has to be learned by Aston Martin itself, on Aston Martin’s own Sundays.

The comparison that should worry Honda most is with Red Bull Powertrains. Building a Formula 1 engine for the first time, with Ford as its partner, it has powered Max Verstappen to three wins, including Sunday’s victory in Mexico. Red Bull sits third on 382 points. Honda brought decades of hybrid-era knowledge and four drivers’ titles with Red Bull into these regulations, yet the newcomer is the one winning races. Honda did officially step back at the end of 2021 before returning to sign with Aston Martin, and some continuity was clearly lost in that period. Even so, the gap is hard to explain away.

The rest of the competitive picture adds to the frustration. Andrea Kimi Antonelli leads the drivers’ championship on 380 points, 119 clear of Verstappen. Mercedes is 126 points ahead of Ferrari in the constructors’ standings. These regulations have produced a clear early order, and Aston Martin, despite its new Silverstone campus, its wind tunnel and a car shaped by Adrian Newey, is not even part of the competitive midfield.

Honda has climbed out of this hole before

The fairest argument in Honda’s favour is its own history. When it returned with McLaren in 2015, the power unit was down on power and badly unreliable. Grid penalties piled up, the relationship deteriorated, and the partnership ended after three seasons. Fernando Alonso, now 45 and in the Aston Martin line-up, lived through those years at McLaren.

What came next is the reason Aston Martin signed with Honda. The manufacturer rebuilt its programme with Toro Rosso in 2018, moved to Red Bull in 2019 and won in Austria that June. By 2021 it had powered Verstappen to the drivers’ title, and its units were the class of the field through 2022 and 2023. Honda’s engineers respond to failure by fixing it methodically, and the record shows that.

The record also shows that the recovery took time: roughly four seasons from the 2015 return to a first win. Aston Martin’s owner, Lawrence Stroll, has spent heavily so that the team does not have to wait that long. Alonso’s career will not wait that long either.

Five points to find in the last four rounds

The short-term target is modest. Williams is five points ahead in ninth, and Haas and Audi are out of reach on any realistic projection. Climbing one place in the constructors’ table is worth real prize money, and a single top-seven finish from either car in the next four races would probably be enough. This weekend’s race at Interlagos, at around 800 metres of altitude, is far less extreme than Mexico City. It is the obvious place to run the power unit conservatively, bring both cars home and take advantage of any attrition.

The bigger question is what this season teaches for 2027. Our view is that Honda and Aston Martin should accept a performance cost over the winter in exchange for durability. They should run the power unit in its harshest conditions on the dyno until failures like Sunday’s are designed out, and only then start finding power. Honda’s history suggests it will solve the problem. Whether it does so in one off-season or three will decide whether this partnership is judged as a slow start or a repeat of 2015.