Fernando Alonso mounts passionate Honda defence after feeling 'singled out'

Fernando Alonso has launched a passionate defence of Honda's current plight with Aston Martin, over a decade on from a similar situation at McLaren. 

Aston Martin has endured a tough start to F1's new regulations with its new works Honda power unit suffering from unreliability and performance issues, with team principal Adrian Newey explaining in Australia that Alonso and Lance Stroll were at risk of "permanent nerve damage" due to severe vibrations in the chassis. 

Newey claimed that the drivers could not complete more than 25 laps, but the team was able to deploy countermeasures to allow Alonso to finish the third race of the season, in Japan. 

It is the second time in his career that Alonso has suffered from a below-par Honda power unit, with 2026 coming 11 years from the start of the doomed McLaren-Honda partnership, which began in 2015.

Alonso's dreams of replicating the Ayrton Senna-Alain Prost McLaren-Honda heyday were dashed owing to the Honda issues, in which he memorably blasted the Japanese manufacturer at Suzuka by branding the power unit as a "GP2 engine."

Although some progress was made in 2016, the partnership was doomed from the start of 2017, and McLaren cancelled the deal later that year for a customer Renault supply for '18, whilst Honda joined forces with Toro Rosso and ultimately Red Bull for '19. 

Recalling the differences between the McLaren-Honda situation and the current Aston Martin one, Alonso delivered a passionate explanation of how he was different and why he felt he had been singled out back in 2015 and not any of McLaren's other drivers at the time. 

"I think I can see things now in a different perspective and a different maturity, but I don’t think that ten years ago things were that dramatic," Alonso told media, including RacingNews365.

"This is Formula 1, a very media-centric sport. When you win a few championships just racing against your team-mate, you are God, and then when you are fighting and having some difficult period, everything is magnified as well. 

"In a way, ten years later, some of the things that people thought about me ten years ago, when we had this situation, now they maybe changed opinion and maybe they think that I was right ten years ago, because for me the biggest surprise was all these last few years thinking that ten years ago McLaren, Stoffel [Vandoorne] Jenson [Button] and myself — because always people seem to remember only Fernando, but I think Jenson, Stoffel and McLaren, we were saying the same — that project, the power unit, was not mature enough when we started, which everyone seems now to understand. 

"But two or three years ago, it seemed that I was crazy, ten years ago, criticising or something like that. It was, I think, a few frustrations on the radio, which, yeah, were there, and as a double world champion and a competitive driver, I was not happy with the situation – wow, you know, should I be happy and clapping inside the car about the job? 

"So now I think when everyone sees from the outside that situation, and they see the current situation, I think they are a little bit more friendly with us, and they understand the problems more. 

"And now what can I do in the team is just work harder, try to help Honda as much as we can, allocating some of the resources that Aston Martin has into the engine, into the power unit, into the vibration problems, into the deployment issues. 

"Obviously, we are now in a different world in Formula 1 with all the data available, all the GPS, the analysis that we can have from the other teams, and we can allocate some of those resources to make Honda… or they can focus on one thing, and we can help them in some other areas on the power unit.

"So, we are one team. As I said, it’s a bumpy start, but I hope it will not last for too long. But it will not be an immediate solution either, so yeah, let’s see."