The FIA has put a number on what Fernando Alonso has been saying for months: Honda builds the weakest engine on the 2026 grid.
Under the sport's new ADUO system — the Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities framework the FIA uses to rank power-unit performance and hand out catch-up allowances — Honda finished bottom of the order. As Autosport put it, the ranking "has been obvious from the start of the season," and the result "was the least surprising aspect" of the process. Red Bull's in-house unit topped the table, and Mercedes and Ferrari were cleared for upgrades. Honda was left at the back, with what the report called limited "room for manoeuvre."
For Aston Martin, the official confirmation only sharpened a frustration that boiled over in Barcelona, where Alonso qualified last at his home race.
"We knew we have the worst car and the worst engine and we've been very clear in every race so far that we have to work," Alonso said after qualifying. He did not soften the verdict: "We have a very poor engine, the worst one. We have very poor energy deployment. We have gearbox problems and aerodynamic problems."
The repetition is wearing on the two-time champion. "We repeat the same thing every weekend. It's exhausting," he said. "We're last, we know it, and we have no problem admitting it."
What makes the season especially bruising is that the weak point keeps moving. Alonso has described a different failing at almost every venue — power in Australia, energy deployment in China, chassis in Monaco, gearbox trouble in Miami. "Zero positives from this weekend," he said earlier in the European run. "We've been racing in very different circuits so far this year. All of them were clear for us in terms of understanding some of our weaknesses." His hope rests on a single large update: "For the second part of the year, the package that we try to bring all at once is tackling all those problems individually."
Team ambassador Pedro de la Rosa has confirmed the trouble runs deeper than set-up. After Monaco he pointed to a handling trait the team had not expected. "We were expecting to be a bit better here, but we found a very, very severe mid-corner understeer in the low-speed," de la Rosa said, adding that "it is something more fundamental than the set-up change."
Honda, for its part, insists progress is coming. Trackside general manager Shintaro Orihara said earlier in the season that the manufacturer had taken its car back to Sakura, run static tests and applied fixes to the vibration problem that has dogged the unit. "We found good progress on vibration on the engine's battery side and also we can see some good progress on vibration for the driver," Orihara said.
Whether that is enough is the question Autosport posed bluntly: what next for Honda? The ADUO allowances give it a route to keep developing, but the deficit is real and the season is already half gone. For Alonso, blunt honesty is what remains. The car is last, and nobody at Aston Martin is pretending otherwise.
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