Fernando Alonso called the engine in the back of his Aston Martin “very bad” after crossing the line two laps down on race winner Andrea Kimi Antonelli at the Madring on Sunday, and told reporters the team has to work out what went wrong before the paddock arrives in Baku next weekend.
The Spaniard’s afternoon fell apart every time he had to lift off. When he slowed to let the leaders through under blue flags, the Honda unit refused to pick up cleanly on the way back to full throttle, and he came close to stalling in the pit lane and again when releasing the throttle to wave cars past.
“Yeah, the engine was very bad,” Alonso told reporters at the Madring.
“The boost control was, yeah, difficult.”
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He described a compounding effect on the recoveries.
“The engine was struggling to recover after that. I was losing a lot of time on the blue flags.”
His conclusion for the debrief was blunt.
“We need to analyse what happened there.”
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Aston Martin stuck in tenth
The call for an internal look comes with the team already at the bottom of the field. Aston Martin sit tenth in the constructors’ standings on three points, and Lance Stroll did not even make the finish in Madrid: he retired after first-lap debris damage combined with a brake pedal problem left him unable to steer the car.
Alonso’s own race was made worse by contact with Carlos Sainz that forced a front-wing change, and he was never in the fight. Up front, Antonelli beat Red Bull’s Max Verstappen to the flag and extended his drivers’ championship lead to 81 points over Mercedes teammate George Russell after 14 rounds of 23.
Alonso already lobbying the FIA
The complaint about the engine did not come out of nowhere. Alonso spent the Madring weekend making a wider argument about the 2026 rules package, and he had already been in talks with FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem and F1 chief executive Stefano Domenicali about giving Honda more room to close the deficit through the manufacturer catch-up mechanism.
“Formula 1 cannot continue in this way,” Alonso said.
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“We cannot wait for 2031 to have a proper sport.”
Honda had gone into the weekend flagging the Madring’s La Monumental banking as a specific concern. Trackside general manager Shintaro Orihara said before the race that the sustained lateral and vertical loads through the 4G corner made the lubrication system a headache and that the Japanese manufacturer would start with a conservative setting.
Whether the recovery problems Alonso reported are connected to that caution is one of the questions the post-race review will now try to answer. The next chance to test any fix is short: the Azerbaijan Grand Prix runs at the Baku City Circuit on Saturday 26 September, a day earlier than the original Sunday slot because the country’s Remembrance Day falls on 27 September.
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