Aston Martin knew before Mexico GP it would not finish, Honda brings new countermeasures

Ahead of the Mexico Grand Prix, Honda had already acknowledged that the race weekend at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez – at 2,286 metres above sea level, the highest circuit on the Formula 1 calendar – would be a considerable challenge.

At that point, the main concern was extreme turbo lag, which had already been a problem in Singapore, although Honda added that reliability would also come under pressure.

The latter proved to be the case on both Saturday and Sunday. During qualifying, Fernando Alonso was instructed to park his car in the Foro Sol despite showing highly promising pace, and things did not go much better for Aston Martin during the race. Both Alonso and Lance Stroll were forced to retire after five laps, with what the team described as “abnormal pressure levels in the PU systems”.

During the media day ahead of the Sao Paulo Grand Prix, the final leg of the American triple-header, Honda’s chief engineer Shintaro Orihara explains what went wrong.

“I can’t explain it in too much detail, but I can give you some ideas. In the race, we have the laps to the grid, that is a kind of unique point. And also in qualifying, we have a tyre preparation lap. We have the same laps in practice, but always in different situations.

“So in those special circumstances our engine behaved a little bit abnormal, not as expected. We got some stress on our ERS cooling from the engine, and then we got some failure on our MGU-K that happened in qualifying and during the race in these special circumstances”, Orihara explained.

“That’s because of the high-altitude condition in Mexico. Here in Brazil, it’s not the same as in Mexico, but still high altitude. So we are bringing some countermeasures for this event, not only on the hardware side, but also on the software side to improve our robustness in that condition.”

Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin Racing

Aston Martin’s chief trackside engineer Mike Krack reveals that the team already knew before the race that neither car would be able to reach the finish in Mexico.

“Yeah, we knew that a bit earlier than Sunday morning.”

Ahead of the Grand Prix, Aston Martin and Honda nevertheless went through various scenarios to see how they could keep the cars running for as long as possible.

“I think you need to be realistic when you prepare, you need to discuss what are the possibilities that you have in the race. There are not many, but there are still a few, so we discussed together what the different levels of escalation could be”, Krack said.

“The first one is obviously free air, but then you also have gear usage, you can also turn the power down, there are many options that you have to discuss. We have discussed those thing, but we didn’t get that far”, Krack said, referring to the fact that each car completed just five laps.

“You have a list of options that you can pull, but we quickly realised that they were insufficient, and then there is nothing you can do.”

Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin Racing

Although the countermeasures should already improve matters somewhat in Brazil – where the thin air is less of an extreme factor – Honda makes it clear that the learning process is primarily focused on next year. By then, the Japanese manufacturer hopes to make a significant step forward not only in terms of outright performance, but also in terms of reliability.

“That was a hard race for Honda’s side, so I understand how frustrated that event was for the drivers. The learning point is that our engine, in special circumstances, there’s some lack of robustness”, Orihara admitted.

“So we can always learn something from that type of problem and we bring these learnings back to the factory, to see how we can prevent those things from happening again in the future.

“At this moment our factory is focusing on the 2027 power unit, so we can apply this experience to improve our robustness of next year’s engine. That was a tough race for us, but we bring those experiences into next year’s engine.”
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