A points finish that came with a warning
Ninth place does not usually start a party. At Zandvoort it did. Fernando Alonso brought his Aston Martin home in the points for only the second time this season, the garage reacted like a podium had just landed, and then the Spaniard sat down and attached an asterisk to the whole thing.
The AMR26 that ran in the Netherlands was a heavily worked car. The B-spec chassis had already appeared in Hungary, and for the Dutch Grand Prix the team added a revised floor, a new front wing and a reworked diffuser. Alongside it came the competitive debut of Honda’s B-spec engine. One of those two changes did its job. The other did not.
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“We’ve gone back a bit to square one”
Alonso’s problem was driveability, and it bit hardest over a single lap.
“We’ll have to wait a bit longer with the engine,” he told AS earlier. “I don’t think this weekend has yielded the result we were hoping for. We don’t have that handling, that gear-shifting feel. Everything we’d improved with the first engine; we’ve gone back a bit to square one with this second one, so we’ve got about two or three races ahead of us to optimise it.”
He was blunter about the next stop. Monza rewards raw power and Aston Martin do not have it. “Monza is going to be one of the worst and there’ll be no chance of scoring points,” he said. The rest of the season, in his reading, will swing the same way: competitive at some circuits, invisible at others.
The chassis is the part he cares about
The reason Alonso is not panicking sits under the bodywork. Aston Martin have spent the year hunting a direction, and the car built around Adrian Newey’s arrival finally handed them one in the Zandvoort corners.
“If we’d brought this package here and found we weren’t performing well in the corners, it would have been worrying,” Alonso said. “But now that we have a clear direction, it’s a matter of optimising and working flat out on this package.”
A second points finish of the campaign is still a thin return for a team of this size, and the two or three races Honda need eat into what little of 2026 is left. Alonso knows what a car that works does to a factory, though.
“Everyone is really motivated now. This result also means both factories will have everyone clocking in at eight o’clock tomorrow, because everyone wants more.”
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