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Welcome back to Prime Tire, where today I’m having just the most remarkable case of déjà vu.
A Fernando Alonso-led, Honda-powered Formula 1 team’s season imploding on the eve of a new campaign because of dramatic engine problems? We’ve very much been here before, as I’ll explain in another trip down F1’s memory lane.
I’m Alex, and Luke Smith will be along later.
Aston Martin’s 2026 start evokes McLaren’s in 2015 … and 2017
F1 testing can never be won, but it sure can be lost.
Narratives set in testing can take a season — or more — to shake. This reflects the long leads required to make a slow F1 car fast. So too with a car that regularly breaks down. And here we arrive at our story of the day: Fernando Alonso and Aston Martin.
The green team had a shocking preseason this year. It was late to the first test in Barcelona, where its car appeared in the final hours of the penultimate day … and broke down after five laps with Lance Stroll aboard.
Come the third and final test in Bahrain three weeks later, both Alonso and Stroll stopped on track, again due to reliability dramas. In Stroll’s case, this involved being fired off into the gravel as something suddenly went wrong with the AMR26’s rear end.
On the final day in Bahrain, Aston managed just six laps, didn’t set a time and packed up early.
Next week, Luke is going to dive into the details of what has gone wrong with the AMR26 and the well-resourced, Adrian Newey-led team. But the main cause identified so far is a serious issue with Honda’s latest F1 engine, particularly with its battery.
Here’s where things start to feel very familiar. Alonso — and Honda — has been here before.
- In 2015, both parties were working together for the first time in F1 — at the McLaren squad that had just ended a 20-year run of using Mercedes engines. It was reuniting with Honda in the hopes of returning to their shared glory days of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
- But on the first day of testing in 2015, McLaren also managed just six laps. It was the start of an awful year for McLaren, Honda and Alonso.
- The Spaniard was also reunited with McLaren, where he raced for one infamous season in 2007.
- Back then, Alonso fell out with his teammate Lewis Hamilton and McLaren team boss Ron Dennis, and was a key witness in the “Spygate” scandal (a topic for another newsletter, but also the subject of a great podcast series from the BBC, should anyone want to skip ahead).
- Anyway, Alonso hadn’t quite gone back to McLaren by choice. His contract extension negotiations with Ferrari broke down in 2014, and the Italian squad promptly moved to replace him with Sebastian Vettel.
- But a 2015 McLaren-Honda deal looked great on paper, until it wasn’t in reality. And the similarities to now in 2026 just keep coming.
Back then, McLaren knew that even if the first Honda V6 hybrid engine wasn’t a complete dud, it would still have a hard time catching the mighty Mercedes team Hamilton and Nico Rosberg were leading.
And so it produced a chassis aerodynamic design Alonso called “aggressive,” and Dennis more tastelessly called “size zero.”
What they were referring to was how tightly the McLaren bodywork covered the new engine — a parallel with how the exquisitely intricate, Newey-penned AMR26 does for Aston in 2026.
Then, as it seems now, the Honda engine didn’t like it.
Clive Mason / Getty Images
In 2015, Alonso and his teammate Jenson Button retired 12 times with car problems. Alonso, never one to waste a good point-making chance, made himself meme-worthy when he sunbathed in a marshal’s collapsable chair after the McLaren broke down yet again in practice for that year’s Brazilian GP (pictured above).
That was just four races after Alonso uttered his famous “GP2 engine!” line — in response to being overtaken twice at Suzuka, effectively comparing Honda’s engine to the slower, lower-powered engines used in F1’s top feeder series (these days called Formula 2).
It was a point he was determined to make at Honda’s home race in Japan.
Things improved slightly in 2016, when McLaren climbed from ninth to sixth in the constructors’ championship. But in 2017, it was back to square one for McLaren-Honda — ninth again after Honda’s internal combustion engine upgrade vibrated to such an extent the other systems couldn’t take it.
Testing in 2017 featured plenty of on-track stoppages. And Honda’s initial V6 turbo hybrid effort in 2015 was indeed a dud, thanks to the poor performance of its electrical energy recovery systems.
The 2017 season was McLaren’s final year with Honda power. In the last preseason test that year, it managed just 217 laps across four days — while in 2026, Aston did 128 across three in Bahrain last week.
- By daily average that’s 54.25 laps a day in 2017 versus 42.7 this time around. Similar, again, with engine vibrations also thought to be a big problem for Honda’s reliability so far in 2026.
- Alonso got vocal fast about his first Honda F1 nightmare, which included one of its engines also expiring just when he looked set for a brilliant result in his debut attempt to win the 2017 Indianapolis 500.
The result of all that acrimony was that Honda vetoed Alonso racing for the Andretti IndyCar team in the 2020 Indy 500. The McLaren-Honda relationship breakdown also meant his embarrassing failure to qualify for the great race in 2019 for McLaren was Chevrolet powered.
But Honda said it had “no objections whatsoever” to working with Alonso again when the Aston F1 deal was first announced. And while Alonso hasn’t got any less political as his F1 starts total shot past 400, he doesn’t have many more options in 2026 compared to 2015.
In the short term, I predict he’ll attack F1’s new engine rules even more than his “the chef can drive the car” comment from the first Bahrain test this month. After all, a rule change might help Honda catch up by hurting other engine builders.
F1’s cost cap rules mean engine builders can’t spend their way out of trouble these days, which makes Honda’s task even harder. There are ways the FIA can help manufacturers that are behind, but based on testing, Honda faces the biggest challenge of them all, just as it did 11 years ago.
And so, long-term, could another explosive exit be on the horizon if Alonso chooses not to stick out his latest F1 predicament?
As we can’t know that yet, here’s Luke with some right-now news and a happier story overall, from Cadillac.
Inside the Paddock with Luke Smith: Cadillac’s first F1 car named for a legend
Cadillac has been rapidly preparing for its F1 debut next week in Australia, but it wasn’t until today that it finally revealed the name of its new car: the MAC-26, standing for Mario Andretti Cadillac 2026.
It’s a touching tribute to Mario Andretti, arguably the greatest American racing driver of all time and the 1978 F1 world champion. Yet it also gives a nod to his involvement in the team’s origins just a few years ago.
F1 initially rejected what ultimately evolved into the Cadillac team, back when it was called Andretti Global, in early 2024. It wasn’t until the team rebranded to Cadillac, a sign of closer ties to co-team owner General Motors, that the sport’s stakeholders would change their tune.
But through this naming, Andretti will be back on the F1 grid in a small way after all.
I was one of the first journalists to visit the Andretti F1 operation in spring 2024, back when it was a small project plowing ahead with plans despite that early rejection. Mario was there that day, and the pride he showed when speaking to people about the project was impossible to miss.
I have zero doubt that this gesture from the main Cadillac team owner, TWG Motorsport, will mean an enormous amount to him.
Back to you, Alex.
Alpine’s Livery Falls … with Mercedes’ on the rise
In Tuesday’s PT, I asked you to rank the 2026 car liveries, after Luke and Madeline Coleman did so in this feature from earlier in the week. And the results are in.
Thank you to everyone who responded. You delivered a rather dramatic fall for the Alpine team, based on average votes out of 10 for each car. Luke and Madeline had its 2026 color scheme up in third in our ranking, and you dropped it all the way to 10th in yours. Brutal.
Aston’s miserable start to the season continued, as its livery dropped from 10th in our ranking to 11th in tours, while Mercedes now leads the way up front. Something tells me that last point will keep coming up this year …
Here are your full re-ranking results:
- Mercedes (7.30)
- Haas (6.97)
- Cadillac (6.82)
- Red Bull (6.82)
- Ferrari (6.45)
- Racing Bulls (6.24)
- McLaren (6.08)
- Audi (6.06)
- Williams (6.03)
- Alpine (5.67)
- Aston Martin (4.71)
Outside the points
🍏 Madeline explained how Apple and Netflix joined forces in F1 coverage, with the former running Season 8 of “Drive to Survive” on its Apple TV platform and the latter broadcasting the 2026 Canadian GP for U.S. subscribers.
🎬 Luke examined why “Drive to Survive” is a sports docuseries still thriving when others created in its image have already been canceled.
🧑⚖️ And the courtroom saga between IndyCar star Alex Palou and McLaren reached a final settlement today. Luke has the full story.
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