Is Aston Martin Trying to Reunite With Mercedes?
Aston Martin’s and Honda’s new alliance has been an underachievement, to say the least. The team has managed a total of three points, at several races, they were even slower than the new team of Cadillac. Though the engine isn’t the sole problem as Aston produced a dreadful chassis that was by far the worst of the cars that have been designed by Adrian Newey, but Aston Martin have managed to bring what is effectively a b-spec car and improve on most of their problems on the side of the chassis.
But the main problem continuous to be the engine. Lawrence Stroll (Aston Martin’s Chairman) ended the partnership that the team had with Mercedes in 2025 in order to get works Honda engines hoping to continue where Red Bull and Honda had left off but so far they have failed miserably.
Honda has an under-powered and at the start of the year an unreliable engine though that has been improved. But the engine deficit is costing Aston Martin about a second per lap even with the recent upgrade that debuted in the last race, with the Japanese manufacturer remaining at the bottom of the pecking order.
With the Mercedes engine clearly being having one of the best engines on the grid Aston are exploring the possibility of a reunion. There have been reports that Stroll and Wolff have met on three separate race weekends with the last meeting taking place in the last race.
Reports state that there is an ongoing evaluation of their choices for 2028 as it’s too late to change engine’s for 2027 with Mercedes being seen as their most logical option due to their history since 2009 and the close personal relationship between the Chairmen of both teams.
There hasn’t been any decision or even an ultimatum to Honda but Aston is using these talks to exert pressure to Honda. With the recent upgrade the team reported little gains with reports also claiming that Honda didn’t run the engine at full power in order to evaluate it’s reliability first, but there is hope of unlocking more performance in the coming races.
HRC president Koji Watanabe stating that 2027 will be a better year but it’s not clear how patient Stroll will be as he is one owner who is happy to pull the trigger when things are going wrong. Though the best scenario for him now is for this project to succeed as McLaren despite winning the last two races spent a lot of time this season trying to understand the new engine as they didn’t have the same understanding as the works team did.
By Paul Kontogeorgos.
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