Four races into the season, Fernando Alonso and his teammate Lance Stroll finally both finished a race together at the 2026 F1 Miami GP. The Spaniard was P15, with the Canadian 17th.
The 2026 Formula 1 season has seen a disastrous start for the newly formed Aston Martin-Honda partnership. The team has been spending time at the back of the grid, battling various issues with their challenger, AMR26. However, the 2026 Miami GP marked a small turning point for the Silverstone-based team.
While they still lack competitive race pace to rise in the rankings, they resolved engine vibration issues that had caused multiple retirements earlier in the season.
Strategy without pace
Aston Martin’s situation at the 2026 F1 Miami GP depicts the ineffectiveness of clever strategies when a baseline performance and pace to support them are absent.
Post Miami GP, Alonso emphasised their performance deficit and the massive gap between them and the cars in front. Even if the cars ahead were caught out by the possible rain and forced to make an extra, unplanned pit stop for wet tyres, they would still exit the pit lane ahead of Alonso due to the advantage they would have built up.
The two-time F1 World Champion did a very long opening stint on mediums of 40 laps.
“We were just waiting for some rain. It may come, you may avoid one stop, but it doesn’t change much because we are one stop behind the next car. So even if it rains and they do an extra pit stop, they are still in front of us. So there is not much we can play.“
2026 Miami GP as Data Sessions
Aston Martin missed out on crucial mileage in the opening rounds of the 2026 season due to race ending problems. Thus, Alonso treated the 2026 F1 Miami GP as a test drive, a data gathering exercise, in order to understand various things under his control.
Their focus is not on finishing at the top 10 at present but to minimize their reliability problems with the engine and gain a better understanding of the 2026 regulations.
The F1 Miami GP weekend gave the first fruit of their hardwork. Both drivers saw the chequered flag at the Sunday race together for the first time.
“I tried to learn on the strategy management and tyre management. Obviously not many laps until race 3 on our side, and now we managed to finish the race with both cars for the very first time. So we have some reliability improvements, and this is what we have to take positively from it.
“We used the soft yesterday on the sprint, so we had that data that they could take 19 laps with no issues, so yeah, we used that data.”
There is still a long way to go
Honda achieved stopping AMR26’s engine from giving scary vibrations to the drivers with countermeasures.
Although this is a major step, Fernando Alonso is realistic about the car’s reliability. Fixing a flaw does not magically generate a lap time.
Though AMR26’s vibrations are better, and both Alonso and Stroll survived to the finish line in the 2026 F1 Miami GP, they still have a long way to go in terms of the car’s performance. Right now the only team they can race on pace are newcomers Cadillac.
“I’m not sure in performance, I don’t think so, just the reliability is a little bit better. We didn’t have any issues, vibrations are better, but now performance I think is very similar to Japan.”
