Alonso Honda 2026: Never Lost a Place in 11 Finishes

The Alonso Honda 2026 story is usually told as a reliability tragedy, and the GridRaces data says that is only half the case. Across 17 starts Fernando Alonso has finished 11 races and gained places in 10 of them; the other was a dead heat between grid and flag. He has never ended a race behind where he started. The problem is everything around those 11 Sundays.

Alonso Honda 2026: what the numbers say

Start with what the driver controls. In the 11 races Alonso has finished, he has moved up from his grid slot ten times, lost zero places, and netted 44 places gained, an average of exactly four per finish. That is the profile of a driver who is not the weak link.

Now the rest. Alonso has not finished six of his 17 races, and his team-mate Lance Stroll has not finished 12 of 17. By our count of cars not classified, Aston Martin has 18 non-finishes in 34 starts, the most of any team; Cadillac is next on 12. Alonso's seven points have come from just three rounds: one at the Monaco Grand Prix (round six, tenth), two at the Dutch Grand Prix (round 12, ninth) and four at the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia (round 16, eighth).

Is Honda's turbo lag a qualifying problem?

It looks like one. Alonso's average qualifying position in 2026 is 18.9, and Stroll's is 20.3. A car that starts there needs the race to do the work, and a power unit that is both slow to respond and prone to stopping gives it no help.

Honda's own account of Singapore points the same way. After Alonso said in qualifying that his turbo was "broken", Honda's chief trackside engineer Shintaro Orihara said on 14 October 2026 that the turbo had not failed, that parts were replaced because of Alonso's feedback, and that the data showed no major issue (RacingNews365 and Crash.net both carried the comments). The Race reported this week that Honda has since found its turbo lag does not behave as its dyno work predicted, possibly linked to how the MGU-K harvests and deploys energy, with no mechanical fault found and countermeasures being prepared.

So the picture is not "the engine breaks". It is "the engine does not behave the way Honda modelled it", which is harder to fix because there is nothing to replace. In Singapore, Alonso qualified 17th, started 20th and finished 16th, four places up on the grid.

What about Stroll, and what does the gap tell us?

Stroll's numbers are harder reading. He has finished five of 17 races, gained places in all five, and has no points. His average qualifying position is 20.3 against Alonso's 18.9, a gap of 1.4 places that is small next to the difference in finishes: 11 against five. In other words the two cars start in roughly the same part of the grid, but one reaches the flag more than twice as often. Some of that will be individual circumstances we cannot see in the results table, so we are not drawing a verdict on the driver here. What the gap does show is how much of the season is decided by whether the car survives, not by how fast it starts.

Does gaining places flatter a bad car?

Fair challenge. Starting near the back makes gains easier, and some of them are other people's misfortune. Nine of Alonso's 11 finishes were classified as lapped, so he is gaining places in a race where he is rarely on the lead lap. Two of his three points finishes started 18th or lower (Monaco from 21st, the Dutch Grand Prix from 18th), which reads more like chaos ahead than a pace breakthrough. That is our reading, not a measured fact.

But the counter-argument cuts both ways. If gains were simply a function of starting low, a poor driver would show a mix of gains and losses. Alonso shows ten gains, one level and no losses. Unfinished races are the missing data, and those are the car's fault as much as anyone's.

For context on how much pit-lane work moves places at this level, see our 2026 pit stop times analysis.

What to watch for Alonso in Austin

Honda said the components would be checked before the United States Grand Prix, so Austin is the first read on whether the countermeasures help. The useful signal arrives before Sunday. In the two rounds where Alonso qualified 16th or better, he finished 14th (Hungarian Grand Prix, from 16th) and eighth (Malaysia, from 12th). Two races is a small sample, but both came when he started closer to the pack.

Our verdict: judge the Honda fix on two numbers rather than one points haul. Where does Alonso qualify, and does he reach the flag? Six non-finishes in 17 starts is the number that needs to move first. Follow the weekend on telemetry, keep an eye on the constructors' table, and read more in GridRaces analysis.

If you think Alonso gets inside the top 16 on Saturday, put your Energy on it with a driver-form pick on the telemetry page.