As the strains on the relationship between Aston Martin and its Formula 1 power unit partner Honda continue and speculation inevitably questions the future of the partnership, it's a good time to look at how the AMR26-Honda is actually performing beyond just the headline depressing Q1 ejections.
While Sepang - where both cars made it through to Q2 for the first time - offered a ray of hope, it was dashed one week later in Singapore where Alonso felt certain the power unit's turbo must be broken, so poor was its performance. Honda later reported it could see no failure...
It begs the question of just where would this car be if it had a competitive power unit? Is it a mediocre car, a rare Adrian Newey dud, with a poor engine? Or a good car with a truly terrible engine?
If we look at the car's performance through the season in the accompanying graph, two things are very clear. 1) The step-change worsening of the car's competitiveness from Barcelona (round seven) to Spa (round 10) as the top teams piled on their developments while the AMR26 remained still in race one spec. 2) The step-change improvement from the car's sole update, in Hungary (round 11). But where does that updated car truly stack up in the quality of its chassis?
We can break down the performances further by looking at GPS data from each track and assessing how much time the car loses in those sections of track taken at full throttle (ie mainly the straights). It's an inexact science because of the confounding number of skewing factors* but it does give an order of magnitude picture which is quite clear.
The following is quite a reductive stat but a significant one. Comparing Max Verstappen's pole time at Sepang to Fernando Alonso's 12th-fastest time, the Aston Martin driver is 2.090s behind despite having surrendered 2.238s to the Red Bull on the full-throttle parts of the lap. The inference is that with power parity Alonso could've been on pole by a tenth and a half.
What is even more eye-opening is that despite the huge disappointment of Singapore, where Alonso went out in Q1 convinced the turbo was broken, the car's corner performance was even more competitive than at Sepang.
It's never quite that simple and we'd need to know comparable drag and downforce numbers throughout the compared speed range too, obviously not something the teams are going to release - to each other or to us. But since that Hungary upgrade, Alonso has been driving a car with a balance and poise that he has praised.
But the hoped-for follow-up of a power unit improvement from Honda has not manifested. While Alonso's praise of the car on the cooling lap at Zandvoort after getting ninth-place points - "Thanks to everyone at Silverstone. Amazing. A lovely car to drive." - coincided with the introduction of the ADUO 1 Honda upgrade, the feedback from both drivers was that it had lost the driveability gains which had been made with the previous version.
When we do the comparison of the Aston Martin to the pole car at each of the tracks since it got its Hungary aero upgrade, we get the following:
Laptime deficit when not on full throttle
Hungary-Singapore
Hungaroring: +1.310s (actual: 2.601s; on full throttle: 1.291s)
Zandvoort: 1.011s (actual: 2.487s; on full throttle: 1.476s)
Monza: 0.237s (actual: 3.364s; on full throttle: 3.127s)
Madrid: 1.003s (actual: 3.564s; on full throttle: 2.561s)
Baku: 2.203s (actual: 4.057s; on full throttle: 1.854s)
Sepang: -0.148s (actual: 2.090s; on full throttle: 2.238s)
Singapore: -0.370s (actual: 2.85s; on full throttle: 3.22s)
We can derive a further set of stats from those numbers, that of an implied percentage split of the deficit between power unit-limited and chassis-limited sections of the lap for each of those tracks.
Percentage of deficit
Power unit vs chassis
Hungaroring: 49.6% / 50.4%
Zandvoort: 59.3% / 40.7%
Monza: 92.9% / 7.1%
Madrid: 52% / 48%
Baku: 47% / 53%
Sepang: 101% / -1%
Singapore: 113% / -13%
These numbers suggest the car, even after its Hungary upgrade, was losing time in the corner and the full-throttle sections, but with the power unit forming the dominant part of the deficit, varying wildly according to track layout. But at Sepang and Singapore it was faster through the corners than the pole car.
Although factually correct we should treat the above numbers with caution (read the small print*). But they do describe a basic outline, one in which corner performance is more than respectable, recently even very impressive.
Worryingly though, as the chassis performance has steadily improved, the power unit appears to be worse with each ADUO upgrade.
The ADUO 1 unit came one race after Hungary, at Zandvoort, and the deficit at full throttle increased by a couple of tenths. This may be nothing more than the respective track layouts but, as recalled, the driver feedback suggested little or no overall progress from the power unit there.
Attending to those driveability issues via a turbo modification resulted in the ADUO 2 spec, which Alonso first got in Baku. This was the power unit in the car when it had such an encouraging run at Sepang, but the intricate corner-upon-corner layout of Singapore triggered it into a nightmare of terrible throttle response and wildly inconsistent deployment.
If the AMR26 could magically be given power unit parity, would it really have been fighting for pole? Not until Sepang, no. Until then, the numbers suggest that since its Hungary upgrade it would have been a high Q2/lower Q3 car. But from Sepang, quite possibly yes. Even in Singapore.
But again, there is a disclaimer about that. For it is quite possible that the Honda power unit's unique architecture (with the MGU-K up front, as requested by Newey, centralising the car's mass) has flattered the car's cornering performance. And that with a more powerful, conventionally configured Mercedes or Red Bull power unit, it could possibly lose that cornering advantage.
But while taking on board the many cautious disclaimers, we can get an order-of-magnitude idea of the split between chassis and power unit responsible for the big laptime deficit of the Aston Martin. A much more detailed version of that picture will be at the very heart of ongoing discussions between the team and Honda and about what the future might hold for the partnership.
*The smallprint: Some of the deficit of the Aston Martin to pole will be track evolution between whatever session the Aston Martin goes out in compared to Q3. That track evolution will vary from event to event.
If we compared the Aston Martin times to the fastest of the session in which Aston Martin was eliminated it would be equally misleading as the quick cars are typically just doing enough to comfortably get through while saving tyres and full power for Q3 while the slow cars are flat-out.
The chosen downforce levels will also skew the chassis vs power unit picture (ie low wing would make the power unit look better than it is).