The 2026 Formula 1 season has proven to be an uphill battle for Aston Martin, as the team has frequently languished at the back of the grid. Their newly forged partnership with Honda has suffered several power unit glitches, leading to multiple frustrating race retirements for both drivers.
Despite persistent reliability hurdles, development efforts behind the scenes never truly stopped. Honda Racing Corporation leadership revealed that the team quietly introduced the ADUO2 upgrade package as early as the Spanish Grand Prix in Madrid, aiming to extract incremental performance gains.
Shintaro Orihara spoke to media representatives, including Motorsport Week, ahead of the Bahrain Grand Prix at Sepang, detailing how the revised turbocharger layout specifically targets driveability and corner-exit boost lag.
“We used ADUO2 to introduce a new turbocharger to improve driveability and also boost lag at the exit of the corner,” Orihara noted. He explained that mitigating turbo lag previously forced them to lean heavily on the MGU-K, which inadvertently sacrificed valuable energy reserves.
Following successful evaluations by Lance Stroll in Madrid and Fernando Alonso in Baku, the technical gains translated into a promising qualifying showing at Sepang, where Alonso managed a surprising P12 grid slot.
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