What next for Aston Martin, Alonso and Honda after big F1 leap?
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The race is on, and after its nightmare start to 2026, Aston Martin finally showed signs of a revival in Hungary after putting a big upgrade on the car. So has Adrian Newey finally got the Silverstone-based team on the right track? Or will there be more bumps in the road, even with a new Honda power unit on the way? I'm Ed Stewart, and joining me to answer that and more are Josh Sutil and John Noble. John, I feel privileged to have you here because it's the August break. Shouldn't you be on a yacht somewhere, surely?
I wish I was on a yacht somewhere. One of my four or five yachts that I own and have in various places around the world, not. Summer break actually is quite a weird one for us because while F1 is actually on holiday and you see lots of people actually on yachts, it's quite a busy one because we keep all this content running through. We've got tons of interviews, kind of need to catch up. So it's not really a shutdown. Maybe we need a shutdown during the season for the journalists, not during the summer break.
I think we should definitely lobby for that. Josh, can we have a shutdown? You're often sorting out what we're running on various parts of the race. So you're the tyrant that's preventing us spending quality time in the Mediterranean.
Yeah.
I think it's all my fault, isn't it, really? There's no other conclusion to come to that. I actually just go to sleep for these three weeks and make you two do most of the work.
Yeah, sleeping's always quite appealing in the August break, actually. So, yeah, the high-profile figures in F1 tend to get very yachty, but the rank and file, which I guess we're part of, but also the countless... mechanics and engineers and design, all those people, they have slightly more modest times. But it's good for there to be a little bit of a break. But we are going to keep talking. So we are going to catch up initially with a little bit of news. Aston Martin's our main topic on this podcast. But even in the August break, there are still talking points. So, John, you recently had a chat with Nicholas Tombasis, the FIA single-seater director. He basically pointed the finger at the F1 manufacturers for the current power unit struggle.
So, what did he have to say?
Yeah, this is an interesting one as kind of the reflections on 2026 come. And I think this was a reference to what Carlos Sainz had said after Spa. I think Spa was... probably a low point for these regulations I think we went from the shock at the start of the season about energy starvation and how bad it was we've come through it we had a run of pretty decent races I think from Miami Miami was alright Spain was really really good Monaco was pretty normal Austria wasn't too bad. And Silverstone was, I'd say, middling. And I think Spa was pretty poor, really. Because it was just a weekend of deployment headaches and cars having no power on the straights and looking terrible through Eau Rouge, Radeon and Blanchimont.
And Carlos Sainz had come out and said... You know, whoever looked at the simulations of this track in 22, when these regulations have been formulated and thought, this is a good idea, kind of needs a head testing, basically, which was very much, I think, pointed at the regulators who'd put these rules together. So we sat down with Nicholas Tombasis, the FI's single-seater director in Hungary, just to reflect on the season. And this kind of came out unprompted about how we'd ended up in this spot. And he said, actually, the FI was well aware of what the problems were. It had been pushing for changes and the race we ran a story. I remember Bahrain last year when they tried to pull down the maximum power allowed on qualifying from 350 to 200.
So it's fairly clear there was some concerns going on then that was rejected by teams. And Tom Bassett says that this was the story of the regs. They knew the problems. They took it to manufacturers and said, we need to do something similar to the 60-40 we're going to eventually end up at. But it was rejected.
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