Aston Martin’s Mexican GP Ordeal Ends After Just Five Laps

Aston Martin experienced in Mexico one of the most painful weekends of its season: the British team that had shown a promising pace in the free practice sessions, left the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez empty-handed after Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll retired after only five laps, a double withdrawal that exposed the weaknesses of the AMR26 and the Honda power unit in extreme conditions and that represented an emotional blow for a team that has been fighting against adversity all year.

Everything began to go wrong in Saturday's qualifying, when Alonso received the order to stop after his first lap in Q1. A cooling problem in the MGU-K left the Asturian without options to fight for a good position on the grid, on Sunday despite changing the piece and several elements of Stroll's car the story repeated itself since from the start, both drivers reported cooling problems and had to lift off, on lap three the team called them to the pits to try to lower the temperatures but the measure did not work, Alonso was the first to retire and Stroll received the order to stop shortly after, both were credited with only five laps completed.

"Mexico always represents a great challenge for power units and things like that, even with that it seems it was not enough so we had to retire the car: we need to understand, qualifying and the race were very frustrating because the free practice went well, we did many laps in FP1, FP2 and FP3 and when we got to the moment of truth qualifying and the race, we did not manage to do enough laps but this is part of the learning process and hopefully we can learn, hard lessons but we can learn things from today" Alonso declared after the retirement.

Shintaro Orihara, Honda chief engineer on track, explained what happened: "We discovered that our ERS cooling circuit was stressed in special circumstances, the race laps were fine but in some special circumstances we found stress in our circuit and, as a result, the car stops. That comes from the altitude" he noted.

The Japanese acknowledged that the problem did not manifest itself in the practices because the conditions were different: "That problem occurred in some special circumstances, so 80% or 90% is fine, except in some special circumstances and that appeared today and also yesterday" he added at the time.

Mike Krack, Aston Martin track boss, wanted to extract something positive from the weekend although he acknowledged that the concern about cooling was a constant: "We always need to analyze very carefully how everything fits, it was certainly encouraging but also worrying for the simple fact that cooling was a challenge from the beginning and that is something that remained throughout the weekend, our biggest challenge here was the impact of altitude, temperature, on cooling, drivability and grip" he explained.

Aston Martin now faces the final stretch of the season with its sights set on 2027: the team trusts that the new Honda engine that is already being tested on the bench, will represent a leap in quality. Alonso despite the frustration, maintains faith: "Completely new engine next year, currently testing on the bench, I have a lot of faith, I have confidence in next year because it is a completely new project and the car is going in the right direction, the chassis side, obviously it is difficult to say in moments like today but we all have great hopes for next year and we still believe we can fix many things" the Asturian concluded.