Aston Martin F1 chief confirms clear the air talks with Honda

Side by side of Orihara in white shirt with serious expression and Krack in green AM kit looking annoyed in front of black background and white Honda/Aston Martin logos — Photo: © IMAGO

Aston Martin

Aston Martin F1 chief confirms clear the air talks with Honda

It's a start, at least

Chris Deeley Editor

Experienced sports writer covering F1 and other motorsports since 2023

Friday 31 July 2026 10:57

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Aston Martin's start to the 2026 season will go down in F1 folklore as one of the worst of the modern era, but things are starting to look brighter for the embattled team.

After coming into the racing year with a power unit which kept shaking the car apart and a painfully slow all-round entry, the Adrian Newey-helmed team introduced a vast swathe of upgrades at the Hungarian Grand Prix which saw Fernando Alonso reach Q2 on pace for the first time this season.

The Honda power unit was the headline issue through the opening weeks of the season though, with Aston revealing that they'd discovered late on in the process that the Japanese company had reassigned many of its F1 specialists to other projects when ramping up to return to the sport.

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Aston Martin’s Chief Trackside Officer (and former team principal) Mike Krack has revealed that the team and their engine supplier have sat down for some 'tough' meetings in the intervening months, but insisted they have served to improve the relationship between the parties as the first major power unit upgrade awaits on the other side of the summer break.

Krack: We need to be professional

“It’s easy to point the finger," he said, "but we sat together and we said, ‘We are in this together. We need to work hard to get out of it together'.

“We knew that there would be a lot of difficult moments. We had more than one meeting where we discussed this, and I think it improved the relationship big time – in the garage, in the engineering office, and also in the whole technical collaboration between [Aston Martin’s factory in] Silverstone and [Honda’s headquarters in] Sakura.

“Believe me, it was tough, but it is something that you have to go through, and then you improve from there.

“I think we need to be grown up, we need be professional, in such situations, and we need to get ourselves out of it. If we manage to be in the game again very soon, then I think we can maybe sit together, look back at these last six months, and take all the positives that we learned from it.”

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