Aston Martin have fixed the chassis, not the engine, and Monza will say so

Alonso started eighteenth at Zandvoort and finished ninth. Two points, and only the second time Aston Martin has scored all year. The easy reading is that the team has woken up. Looking at where it has happened and where it has not, my reading is less comfortable: the chassis is no longer the problem, and the engine is. And the two tracks where this showed are precisely the two where a weak engine hides best.

What they brought to Hungary was not an upgrade

Aston Martin arrived at the Hungaroring with sixteen components declared as upgraded, a new nose, reworked aero surfaces and a serious weight reduction. The mechanics broke the FIA curfew to get it all fitted to both cars in time. With that list in front of you, calling it an upgrade package undersells it: it is a different car sitting on the same chassis and gearbox.

It is also the first time Adrian Newey’s hand is visible on the AMR26. What Alonso said afterwards is the part that interests me, because he did not talk about speed. He talked about behaviour. The car is more glued to the ground, more predictable and easier to drive, with the grip in the corners under his control. He called it “a first step of good things coming”.

That is not marketing copy. It is the description of a car that has stopped fighting its driver, and it is exactly what you need for strategy to become a tool instead of a lottery.

Zandvoort confirms it, and in the right place

On Sunday Alonso climbed nine places on a two-stop, the same as the winner and one fewer than almost everyone around him. In a race with rain at the start, a red flag and cars stopping four times, that does not come from power. It comes from a car that looks after its tyres and a pit wall that calls it right. Alonso said as much himself: the AMR26 manages its rubber far better.

Put another way: he scored with the half of the car they have fixed. Not the other one.

The other half

Here is the problem, and it is not a small one. 2026 brings new engine regulations, Aston Martin is the Honda works team, and Honda turned up admitting its power unit was not good enough as early as the Bahrain test. The figures doing the rounds put the deficit at 80 to 100 horsepower against the Mercedes.

The engine update that arrived at Zandvoort of all places is reckoned to be worth around 30 horsepower, with optimists talking about half a second a lap. Even being generous, that leaves the hole half filled. And the hardest part is still outstanding: driveability, meaning how the power is delivered rather than how much of it there is.

The detail that sums up the weekend: Alonso was last on the grid for the sprint with engine and aerodynamic problems, and started from the pit lane. On Sunday he scored. Both things, the same weekend.

Why the two good tracks do not count as proof

This is the part almost nobody is saying. The two races where the new car has looked good are the Hungaroring and Zandvoort: two slow, twisty circuits, and among the least power-dependent on the calendar. They are exactly where a good chassis shows most and where a weak engine hides best.

And there is a counter-test. At Silverstone and Spa, which are engine tracks, the deficit was still enormous. So the pattern is not “Aston Martin have improved”. It is “Aston Martin have improved where horsepower does not matter”.

What our simulator says, and what it cannot say

Time to be honest about our own limits. Our engine gives each car a single performance number, so it cannot separate chassis from engine. On its start-of-season rating the Aston Martin is the tenth car of eleven, a 33 out of 100, ahead of only the Cadillac.

And that cost us a published miss: in our Zandvoort preview we had Alonso at an average of P13.2 and he finished ninth. It was the second biggest error of the race. The cause is exactly the subject of this article: the model was measuring a car that no longer exists, because the ratings are frozen from before the upgrades.

What we can measure is what fixing it would be worth. In our simulation of all 22 drivers in all 11 cars, Alonso in the real Aston Martin averages P10.37. Lift the car from 33 to 55, which is Alpine or Racing Bulls territory, and he goes to P8.8. Barely a place and a half. Give him the Mercedes and the same 45-year-old finishes P2.64, winning 4.5 races a season.

That is the real scale of the problem. No chassis update is worth eight places. Horsepower is.

The real test is 6 September

If this reading is right, it checks itself, and soon. The next race is Monza, on the weekend of 4 to 6 September, the most power-dependent circuit of the year. It is the exam that Hungary and Zandvoort were not.

My call, and I am putting it in writing before it is run: if the chassis is what changed, Aston Martin will be out of the points at Monza and we will hear again that the weekend “did not suit our car”. If they score anyway, then the Honda update was worth a good deal more than thirty horsepower, and this article needs rewriting.

We will publish the odds for the Grand Prix before the race, as always, and the contrast after. They all live in the model’s scoreboard, hits and misses included.