Honda admits it cannot explain Lance Stroll's 13th retirement of the 2026 season

Lance Stroll retired from the Brazilian Grand Prix at Interlagos after just 30 laps, struck by a battery failure that Honda’s own engineers cannot yet explain — his 13th DNF of the 2026 Formula 1 season.

Stroll was running 18th and 28 seconds behind 12th-placed team-mate Fernando Alonso when his Aston Martin AMR26 ground to a halt. His only comment in the post-race media pen was characteristically brief: “Battery issue,” followed by “It was alright” when asked how the car had felt before the retirement.

Honda trackside general manager and chief engineer Shintaro Orihara was more forthcoming. “Yesterday we had a battery issue on Lance’s car, and we had another battery issue today on Lance’s car, and at the moment, we know what happened, but we don’t know what is the root cause,” Orihara said. “So we will check the data and also we will check the battery, and it may take a few weeks to find the root cause.”

Orihara stressed that resolving the issue before 2027 is critical. “From the data we need to find some countermeasure for next year and also we need to find the actual root cause of this error, otherwise we keep having the same issue — so this is quite important for us to understand.”

The latest failures echo — though are likely unrelated to — the engine-vibration problems that damaged batteries early in the season, when the AMR26 initially could not complete a full race distance without intervention. “Middle of season our reliability was better, and the last two or three races we had several issues,” Orihara acknowledged, adding that it is currently unclear whether the recurring battery faults are linked to mileage or operating conditions.

Alonso fared better in São Paulo, reaching Q3 in wet qualifying conditions before dropping out of the points on the opening lap and finishing 12th, 20 seconds behind 10th-placed Nico Hülkenberg. Orihara noted that the rain masked the Honda power unit’s underlying weaknesses. “Wet condition hides our weakness of engine performance and also some short deployment,” he said, while conceding that driveability improvements identified over the race weekend still need to be addressed.

Stroll’s 13th retirement of the season — excluding the Melbourne race, where he failed to complete enough laps to be classified but did not formally retire — underlines the scale of Aston Martin’s reliability crisis heading into the final rounds of 2026.