Fernando Alonso's devastating verdict on Aston Martin's Hungarian GP upgrades

Fernando Alonso

Fernando Alonso's devastating verdict on Aston Martin's Hungarian GP upgrades

Aston Martin have brought a plethora of upgrades to Hungary this weekend

Sam Cook Digital Journalist

Sports Journalist who has been covering motorsport since 2023

Friday 24 July 2026 10:55

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Two-time F1 world champion Fernando Alonso has said that 'no package in the world' can help Aston Martin recover a significant amount in 2026, as the team bring a raft of upgrades to the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend.

Design legend Adrian Newey has been working very hard to bring an 'AMR26B' to the Hungaroring this weekend, designed to hopefully help the team compete higher up the grid.

They have only scored one world championship point from the opening 10 grand prix weekends of the season so far, as they have struggled with reliability and performance issues.

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That is despite the fact they have two-time world champion Alonso driving their cars and Newey, who has won 26 championships across his illustrious career, as their team principal and managing technical partner.

But their road to recovery is supposed to start this weekend with the wholesale chassis upgrades, before their power unit manufacturer Honda bring upgrades to their power unit from the Dutch GP after the summer break.

Alonso, however, does not think that the gains will be significant enough for them to be regularly challenging the likes of Alpine and Haas for points, with word coming from the team that they are targeting more the Cadillac/Williams section of the grid.

Alonso's scathing assessment of Aston Martin's upgrades

"I'm not thinking too much on numbers or positions or something like that, because if we go back to the last five races, I think we have very different gaps with the midfields," Alonso told media ahead of the Hungarian GP.

"We had more or less consistent gap to the pole position, which is unreachable, obviously, at this moment. But there were a couple of tough circuits: Silverstone was tough, Spa was one of the toughest, I think we had the guy in front of us, 2.1 seconds.

"So, there is no package in the world that will give you that amount of time and probably the position will not change, if you run the updated car in Spa one week ago. So, that's how we need to treat it.

"It will change circuit by circuit. Hopefully Budapest is a friendly circuit for us, power is not the most important point here, which obviously we will update the car, but not the engine yet.

"So we still have some deficit that we need to overcome. I'm more into, we can understand what is the direction of the car, if we are on the good path, and if we unlock, finally, the performance."

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F1 Aston Martin Adrian Newey Fernando Alonso Hungarian Grand Prix