Aston Martin endured another woeful Saturday at the Formula 1 Italian Grand Prix. Lance Stroll suffered his 100th career Q1 exit, while Fernando Alonso’s session was cut short by a power unit fault serious enough that the team has now confirmed he’ll start Sunday’s race from the pit lane.
“Yesterday in Q1 we identified some abnormal behaviour (in the data) on some of the PU components of Fernando’s car. This prevented Fernando from completing a final run in qualifying. We worked on the car overnight as a result, and Fernando’s car will start the race from the pit lane,” the team said in a statement.
Stroll’s session exposed just how far the Aston Martin Honda-powered package is from being competitive at a pure power circuit. He qualified 0.7 seconds off the fastest Cadillac, a damning gap given Cadillac sit toward the back of the grid themselves. Asked whether the session was worse than expected, his answer was curt: “It’s very expected.”
The picture only got bleaker gazing ahead to Sunday. Asked about his aims for the race, whether it might be holding position in the pack, Stroll didn’t entertain the idea: “three seconds off, not going to stay with the pack.”
More technical issues for Aston Martin
Asked how difficult it had been to organise a tow given Alonso’s engine problems disrupted the usual teamwork, Stroll’s response was equally short: “It’s normal. It’s always difficult.” Even the basics of a shared qualifying strategy, something most teams rely on at a track like Monza, were compromised by the day’s technical issues.
Alonso’s own account of the session, given before the team’s statement confirmed the scale of the problem, described a car that didn’t fire on his final run. “The engine didn’t start, so we have a problem with the power unit. I don’t know if it’s the ICE or the battery or whatever it is, but it didn’t start,” he said, adding that the lap that was important was set on scrubbed tyres after a long, cold wait in the pit lane. “I think there is something more to come.” Whatever grid position that lap might have earned him is now moot; he’ll start from the back on Sunday regardless.
But Alonso’s broader technical explanation revealed the real scale of Aston Martin’s problem this weekend, independent of the PU fault itself. Monza, he explained, isn’t a circuit where Honda’s recent drivability improvements can mask a raw power deficit. “You go full throttle for 90% of the track, so yes, we did improve on drivability…, but in Monza you prefer to have more power than drivability.” He expects that improvement to show up more clearly at circuits like Madrid or Singapore, where throttle application matters more than outright top speed.
The numbers back up how severe the gap is. Alonso noted Aston Martin have hit 350-355 km/h at Barcelona and Budapest this season, but only around 312 km/h at Monza, a drop of roughly 40-50 km/h at the one circuit where raw straight-line speed matters more than anywhere else on the calendar. “It’s not anymore the Temple of Speed,” he said, only half-joking, for a car that can’t reach the numbers this circuit used to demand.
Alonso was careful not to pin it all on Honda alone. “The chassis is very good; we saw that in Budapest and Zandvoort… on the chassis we found the direction to get better into next year. Now we need to do the same on the engine.” He also pointed to Las Vegas as another likely low point later in the season, another low-drag, high-speed circuit that will expose the same deficit, while circuits including Singapore and Austin should suit the car better.
Despite the result, Alonso was notably unconcerned by the bigger picture. “To be honest, we are at the back of the grid, so I’m not too stressed about this year… it will not change our mentality, our determination to have a better 2027.” For a two-time champion and famously exacting about performance, that’s a considerable admission: Aston Martin’s 2026 is effectively being written off in favour of building toward next year.
There was a lighter note to the weekend too: Alonso ran a helmet tribute to Adrian Campos, the man who gave him his first single-seater chance and his first F1 test with Minardi. “If I’m here, it’s thanks to Campos… Monza was one of the first tracks I came to with him in Formula Nissan,” he said, a personal thread running through an otherwise difficult weekend for the team.
For Aston Martin, Monza was never going to be kind. The scale of the gap it exposed, a genuine PU fault on top of it, and Alonso’s own resignation to the bigger picture suggest the team already knows the real fight starts in 2027.
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