Fernando Alonso achieved his best result of the season at Zandvoort. A ninth place that tastes like glory, especially since he had to climb nine positions during the race. However, there was a sting: the Honda engine did not improve as much as expected. In fact, it brought back some problems that seemed forgotten.
The handling and the issues with engaging gears returned with Honda’s new power unit. Aston Martin remained the slowest car on the straight, which made overtaking or defending oneself impossible. After the race, Fernando Alonso has given Honda another wake-up call.
The new Honda engine rekindled handling and gear-change problems
If someone had told us before the Zandvoort race that Alonso would secure his best result of the season, we would have thought the new Honda engine a success. But nothing could be further from the truth. Alonso was the slowest straight-line racer in the Netherlands, and his points came from his driving and the enormous aerodynamic improvement that almost everyone notices.
After testing the new Honda engine, Alonso could not hide his disappointment: “We’re back to square one with this engine. It didn’t deliver the result we expected this weekend.” And the problems that seemed forgotten at the start of the season resurfaced at Honda.
“We don’t have that handling, that gear change, everything we had improved with the first engine,” Alonso admitted. One of Aston Martin’s early-year issues was that the gears would engage randomly, out of sync. They fixed it, but Honda’s new engine repeats the same problem.
The new Honda engine was supposed to deliver about 30 hp. However, it seems that only 15 hp were actually enabled in Zandvoort. The rest was left unused as a precaution. Now Honda and Aston Martin will have to fix those small problems again, as they did with the first engine.
That’s how Alonso also explained it, saying, “we have two or three races ahead to optimize it. And for the rest of the year, there will be circuits where we perform better and others where we don’t.” The positive side is that in terms of power and optimization there should be more potential left in that Honda engine for future races.
The downside is that Monza, the temple of speed, is coming up, where Aston Martin, Honda and Fernando Alonso have every reason to expect a difficult time.
Images | Aston Martin, Honda
