Honda chief bullish on Aston Martin project: 'It's getting better and better'

Honda Racing president Koji Watanabe is very upbeat about Aston Martin's prospects following the summer break.

Aston Martin have not had a good start to the season, and are currently sat down in 10th in the constructors' championship with just one point to their name from the opening 11 grand prix weekends.

Part of this has been down to their new power unit partnership with Honda, which has yielded unreliable and slow power units to be put into the back of an already underperforming AMR26 chassis.

At the recent Hungarian Grand Prix, Aston Martin brought 16 upgrades to their chassis which helped Fernando Alonso to get into Q2 during qualifying for the first time, while Lance Stroll and Alonso finished 13th and 14th respectively in the race.

Team principal and managing technical partner Adrian Newey revealed that there were more upgrades coming to the chassis at the upcoming Italian and Azerbaijan Grands Prix, too, and Watanabe is excited to see where these can take the team.

Watanabe's company have also developed a new, upgraded power unit for Aston Martin, which was tested earlier this week at the Hungaroring, and will be used by the team at the Dutch GP after the summer break.

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Watanabe is sure that the team are on the right track to get closer to the midfield outfits as the season progresses.

"Our partnership with Aston Martin is getting better and better," Watanabe told AutoSport. "I think we're now in complete agreement on how to improve the overall performance of each car, what goals we should set, and what kinds of trials we should try to achieve that."

Watanabe then went on to discuss the upgrades which were so successfully implemented on the AMR26, as well as revealing what is still to come.

"In Hungary, we focused on updating the chassis," he continued. "For the next race in Zandvoort, the updates will be mainly focused on the power unit, but when we change something, we never develop only one side; they always go together.

"In that sense, we want to make sure we get a good result for our next match in Zandvoort."

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