Aston Martin's 2026 season finally moved in Hungary. The next test starts on a filming day.
The team brought a 16-part chassis upgrade package to the Hungaroring, its first substantial development swing of a year spent scrapping with newcomer Cadillac at the back of the grid. Fernando Alonso reached Q2 for the first time in 2026 and qualified a season-high 16th; in the race Lance Stroll and Alonso finished 13th and 14th, ahead of an Alpine and both Haas and Williams cars.
Aston Martin chief trackside officer Mike Krack said the gain landed where the team had hoped.
"We came here and we said the main objective is to go back racing," Krack said. "I think we achieved that. I think the upgrade package works. And now we need to bring the next steps."
The next step is the engine, and it is arriving unusually quickly. Honda's trackside general manager and chief engineer Shintaro Orihara confirmed after the race that the upgraded power unit would run on a filming day in Hungary on the Wednesday at the start of the summer break, before its competitive debut at Zandvoort.
"That is a good opportunity to check how our new engine works on the chassis," Orihara told The Race. Filming days cap teams at 200km and force the use of special demonstration tyres, so it is a systems check rather than a performance read.
Orihara was blunt about why the timing matters now rather than later.
"Now we are back to racing the field. Then all improvement is very important to catch up to others," he said. "To introduce the new power unit in Zandvoort is quite important now the chassis is working well. So our power unit should bring some laptime."
Honda's ability to move at all this year comes from the FIA's additional development upgrade and opportunities scheme, introduced with the 2026 reset to let lagging manufacturers catch up. As gpfans noted, Honda has the worst-performing power unit on the grid and was granted two homologations in the first round of ADUO rulings, with the second window opening after round 12 — the Dutch Grand Prix on 23 August.
Alonso is less willing to call it a turning point. Speaking to PlanetF1.com and other accredited media in Hungary, he framed the chassis gain as an obligation rather than a reward.
"We are one team. We work together. We know our weakness and we try to help each other," Alonso said. "I think Honda was trying to help some of the weaknesses of the car at the beginning of the year. Now with the chassis, we try to help Honda as much as we can."
Then the caveat: "It's a long way to go. We understand that, we are aware of that, but this hopefully is the first step, and both factories are gaining confidence and trust in what they do, so that probably will be more important than anything else for the next few months."
Asked by The Race how much pressure the chassis gain now puts on Honda, Alonso first replied "some pressure, isn't it?" before insisting the two factories were covering for each other rather than competing.
The engine vibrations that shaped Aston Martin's early-season problems reappeared on Friday in Hungary, though team and supplier both said they were not the same issue. Alonso reported they were "fixed completely" once a fresh engine went in from Saturday, suggesting "maybe that's the old power unit that is a bit at the end of its life."
Adrian Newey, whose design team drove the 16-part package, has said more chassis parts are coming at Monza and Baku. Alonso expects the bigger unknowns to be elsewhere.
"I think as expected, more or less the correlation is good and the performance gains are there, what we expected," he said. "It's obviously early days with this new car. It's a completely new car, new concept, so more to come, maybe on setup, optimisation, and things like that."
His read on Zandvoort is deliberately unromantic: "Next races also with the engine upgrade, it will be an interesting check in Zandvoort [of] where we are and what we can fight for."
Aston Martin appeared to leapfrog Williams, Cadillac and Haas in Hungary's race pecking order. Whether that holds when everyone returns with their own upgrades is the question the filming day cannot answer.
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