After months of gesturing vaguely toward “the summer”, Honda has finally put a specific race on the calendar for its long-awaited power unit upgrade: the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, the first event back after the August shutdown. Concrete. Specific. Only took half a season of embarrassment to get there.
A Deadline, At Last
Honda trackside general manager Shintaro Orihara broke the news ahead of the British Grand Prix weekend with characteristic understatement. “I kept saying summer; maybe that’s a boring answer,” he said. “So I’ll say our target is the Netherlands. We are working hard to complete our job list to achieve bringing a new power unit to the Netherlands. That is our target.”
The sequencing is now locked in. Aston Martin‘s heavily revised chassis debuts at the Hungarian Grand Prix, the race before the summer shutdown. Then the new power unit arrives at Zandvoort. Two major upgrades, staged across two races, with fans finally having a proper timeline to hold the team accountable to.
What Honda Is Actually Changing
Orihara was unusually candid on the technical detail. Crucially, all the modifications are entirely internal, requiring no fresh installation work on the AMR26 chassis. Honda is reworking the combustion chamber shape, modifying the pre-chamber, and overhauling the lubrication system to reduce friction. Reliability improvements are baked in too, because, as Orihara sensibly noted, there is no point chasing extra power if the engine expires before the chequered flag.
Honda has significant ADUO development tokens available and Orihara confirmed a long list of parts will be modified, though he declined to specify exact numbers. “Quite big parts we will modify,” was as specific as he got.
The Power Question
Asked for the headline horsepower gain, Orihara did what every engineer does and sidestepped neatly. “I know the number from the dyno, but I can’t disclose it,” he said, adding that Honda is aiming for “a reasonable big step rather than a small step.” He was also quick to manage expectations: “There is no magic in Formula 1. I don’t think we’re going to catch Mercedes or RBPT by one step.” Refreshingly honest, given that Aston Martin currently sits tenth in the constructors’ standings with a single point to its name. You can read more about how stark the Mercedes engine advantage currently looks.
The Sprint Weekend Problem
Here is the detail that deserves more attention. Zandvoort runs to a Sprint format. That means Honda and Aston Martin will be introducing an untested power unit into a weekend that offers virtually no free practice buffer before Sprint Qualifying on the Friday afternoon. If anything goes wrong early, there is no quiet session to quietly fix it before the cameras are rolling on every lap.
Pressure on Every Front
After Adrian Newey’s candid admission that Aston Martin’s 2026 disaster was partly his own fault, the expectations on both the chassis and engine upgrades to deliver are enormous. Fernando Alonso has been patient, publicly at least, but patience without results eventually becomes something else entirely.
Honda insists Zandvoort is only the first step and further upgrades will follow. That may well be true. But right now, one solid step forward would be a welcome change from a season that has felt like standing on quicksand.
