Alonso targets survival in Baku as Honda power deficit leaves Aston Martin four seconds off pace

Fernando Alonso arrived at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix with a single, pragmatic objective: bring the car home intact. Aston Martin’s Honda power unit deficit has rendered the Baku street circuit a damage-limitation exercise, with the team qualifying three seconds behind the Q1 leader and four seconds off George Russell’s pole lap.

The scale of the problem was laid bare in second free practice, where Alonso was clocked at a scarcely believable 30km/h slower than Russell on Baku’s 2km start-finish straight. As was the case at Monza, the high-speed nature of the circuit offers no way to mask the Honda engine’s shortcomings, and any lingering hope of a competitive weekend evaporated before qualifying had even begun.

Both Alonso and team-mate Lance Stroll then took fresh engine penalties, resulting in significant grid drops that rendered their qualifying positions largely academic. With Williams’s substantial chassis upgrade lifting it clear of the back of the grid, Aston Martin finds itself once again locked in a battle with newcomer Cadillac for the final points positions.

Asked directly what his goal was for the race, the two-time world champion was characteristically dry. “Try to finish the race, make no mistakes like I did today, and don’t crash the car,” Alonso said. “We are fighting for not many important places, so it’s important to keep the car alive for the triple-header. There are three races now, so we need to take care of the stock parts and things like that.”

Baku is the first stop of a three-week stretch that also takes in Malaysia and Singapore — circuits where Aston Martin’s straight-line weakness is less likely to be as brutally exposed. Preserving components for that run is now the team’s primary concern in Azerbaijan.

Alonso did find reason for measured optimism in the car’s handling, at least. “Today I’m much happier than yesterday with the car,” he said. “We made a lot of set-up changes overnight and I felt much more confidence in FP3 and qualifying. I was able to push the car more.”

The broader picture remains bleak for a team that had hoped a major upgrade package introduced in Hungary would arrest a slide that had seen it fall behind Cadillac in the constructors’ standings. On power-sensitive circuits, the Honda deficit continues to override any chassis gains Aston Martin has managed to find.