(Motorsport-Total.com) – Aston Martin is bringing a virtually completely revised B-spec chassis to the Hungaroring this weekend, but Fernando Alonso is doing his best to temper the high expectations in the paddock.
Read more Perez sounds the alarm in Budapest: Is Aston Martin now catching up with Cadillac?
After a catastrophic season so far in 2026, the traditional British racing team – apart from a lucky point gain for Alonso in Monaco – is at the bottom of Formula 1. The Spaniard now makes it clear that even the long-awaited major update cannot work wonders.
“There is no package in this world that brings you so much time,” says the Spaniard, referring to the current deficit of about five seconds per lap in terms of race pace. “Probably nothing would have changed in our position, even if you had driven the updated car a week ago in Spa. That’s exactly how we have to approach and look at the matter.”
The numbers from the past few weeks speak a clear language: Most recently in Spa-Francorchamps, Alonso and his teammate Lance Stroll qualified for the very last row of the grid for the fifth time in a row. The gap to Sergio Perez’s Cadillac ahead of them was a gigantic two seconds.
While the US competition has continuously developed its car, Aston Martin deliberately held back with updates to tackle fundamental problems with the AMR26 at the root.
Alonso calculates: No update can make up two seconds
The moment of truth now arrives at the Hungaroring with a drastically modified chassis, including new aerodynamics and reduced mass, before an engine update is to follow only after the summer break in Zandvoort. But while Perez at Cadillac suspects that Aston Martin will “definitely” close the gap, Alonso is significantly more skeptical about an immediate performance leap.
“I’m not thinking so much about numbers, positions or anything like that. Because if we look back at the last five races, we had very different gaps to the midfield,” the two-time world champion clarified on Media Thursday. The fundamental problem lies in the sheer size of the deficit, which a single aerodynamic package simply cannot make up.
“We had a more or less constant gap to pole position, which is currently unattainable for us, of course. But there were a few extremely difficult tracks: Silverstone was tough, and Spa was one of the hardest tracks ever – the driver directly in front of us was 2.1 seconds away,” the 44-year-old calculates.
Hope for Budapest and understanding the direction
A small glimmer of hope remains for the Hungarian Grand Prix, however, regarding the pure track profile. The tightly winding circuit does not necessarily demand the highest engine performance, where Aston Martin is still at a disadvantage due to the pending Honda update.
“It will differ from racetrack to racetrack. Hopefully, Budapest is a circuit that suits us a bit more. Engine performance is not the decisive factor here – and we will update the engine, but only later,” explains Alonso.
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“So we still have a deficit that we need to make up. My main concern is to understand the direction of the car. Whether we are on the right track and whether we can ultimately unlock the performance.”
The superstar’s statements align exactly with the tenor of the team management from Silverstone. This weekend, everything at Aston Martin revolves around targeted expectation management. The fact that a racing team essentially brings a complete B-spec car to the start in the middle of the season has become an absolute rarity in modern Formula 1 regulations. Accordingly, the primary goal in Budapest is to get to know the new material and collect data.
Krack slows down: “No tests like in winter”
Aston Martin’s Head of Trackside Performance, Mike Krack, underlines the complexity of this mammoth task. The main challenge lies in the fact that the team has no test kilometers available outside of the race weekend.
“When you bring such substantial upgrades, the trackside team has to learn to understand them as quickly as possible,” Krack points out. “We don’t have winter tests where you can simply do a few runs and back-to-back comparisons. That places an extreme amount of weight on the quality of your data and the understanding of your simulations.”
Krack also warns against expecting miracles on the stopwatch from the first free practice session: “We by no means expect to get everything out of it on the first run tomorrow. We have to learn how to deal with it and get the best out of it. We have a good trackside team and a strong support team in the factory who will analyze this quickly. We will draw the right conclusions quickly, but it will take some time.”
Fundamental work is paramount
Instead of reaching for the stars, the engineers around Adrian Newey and Mike Krack will be busy with painstaking tuning work in the coming weeks to understand the redesigned car (including a return to the high-rake concept) on the track.
“I think the fundamental tests we need to carry out – be it regarding ride height, car attitude (rake) and all these things – will extend over the next events,” Krack concludes.
For Aston Martin, this weekend is by no means about “do-or-die,” but rather about the first step of a long learning process. Whether the B-spec AMR26 will at least bring the team closer to Cadillac and the back of the midfield will be shown in the first sessions at the Hungaroring.
Read more Perez sounds the alarm in Budapest: Is Aston Martin now catching up with Cadillac?