F1 insider makes shocking Aston Martin Honda 'scapegoat' claim

The well-documented problems at Aston Martin this season may not be as much as Honda's fault as many think according to one prominent F1 insider.

The Silverstone team have endured a terrible season, picking up only seven points and three points finishes through Fernando Alonso having been hoping to challenge the top teams in 2026 after a regulations and rules reset and the arrival of design genius Adrian Newey.

Much of the criticism though has been directed at the engine supplier Honda, who under the FIA's official ADUO benchmarking have one of the worst power units in F1, severely hampering Aston Martin's straight line speed.

Estimates have indicated that Aston Martin are one of the best cars through corners this season.

But Former Ferrari engineer Rob Smedley has hit back against these claims, claiming that the figures being reported don't take into account Aston Martin running high downforce due to having a car that is producing too much drag in a straight line.

Smedley: Honda are bad but not that bad

In a message read out on the High Performance Racing podcast, Smedley said: "[It's] failed to link the increasingly poor power unit to increases in drag for each development step, which carried a commensurate increase in downforce.

"Hence, the cornering being flattered with an inefficient, albeit high downforce, aerodynamic configuration. The power unit is relatively poor. There is no doubt, but we are at risk of repeating the initial hybrid era conclusions of a brilliant Red Bull racing chassis and a terrible Renault engine."

Red Bull ended the 2013 F1 season with nine straight victories for Sebastian Vettel, before F1's new rules for 2014 ditched V8 engines and moved into turbo-hybrid V6 power units.

This led to utter Mercedes domination and Red Bull being relatively nowhere, with much of the blame for their slow 2014 car being on the Renault powerunit, especially according to Newey who was working as the team's lead designer at the time.

Smedley added: "The Red Bull for those first few years was really inefficient, yet all the blame was laid at Renault's door for the lack of straight line speed. It's simply not true when reverse engineered."

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Aston Martin and the 'Honda scapegoat'

Former Aston Martin team principal and fellow HPR podcast host Otmar Szafnauer agreed with Smedley's analysis, hinting it was easier to blame the Honda engine rather than an internal Aston Martin problem.

Szafnauer said: "If you have inefficient downforce, you can either blame drag, or you can blame the engine."

Szafnauer then added that he had spoken to a senior member of the Aston Martin team, and claimed he was told that Honda's issues were a useful deflection.

He continued: "One of the seniors within Aston said to me 'Otmar, we're really really fortunate to have Honda, it's really lucky we have Honda,' and I said, 'Why would you say that?'. He said, 'Because now we have got a scapegoat.'"

GPFans have contacted Aston Martin for comment.

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Written by

Dan Ripley - Global Editor

I've been a massive F1 fan since the mid 1990s and continue to study the history of the sport long before that. As an experienced motor sport reporter covering F1, MotoGP and the LeMans 24 Hour race, being part of GPFans has allowed me to work with a diverse team with all sorts of different backgrounds in watching the sport and given me a greater appreciation of F1.

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