From our other sites
The story
Multiple foreign media outlets have reported that F1’s Aston Martin may switch its power unit supplier from Honda to Mercedes. It’s also been reported that Mercedes’ CEO has visited the team’s motorhome twice.
On the forum thread, comments ranged from worry over whether Honda would have anywhere left to supply if the switch happens, to criticism of the chassis’s lack of performance, to people looking back on the circumstances behind the team’s split from Red Bull.
This is truly a shockwave. Multiple foreign media outlets have reported that F1’s Aston Martin will switch its power unit (PU) supply deal from Honda — its partner since the start of this season — to Mercedes.
The Aston Martin-Honda pairing has been mired in a historic slump since the season opener, rolling out a string of major upgrades across the summer break. With Fernando Alonso finishing 9th at the Dutch Grand Prix on the 26th, they finally seem to be catching a spark of momentum.
Amid all this, Spain’s major newspaper Sport ran a story headlined “Shocking… Aston Martin holds talks with Mercedes, piling pressure on Honda.” It reported that “Mercedes’ CEO has now visited Aston Martin’s motorhome for a second time, fueling speculation over a possible change of power unit supplier.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Is there even a team left that'll sign with them?
Nope.
No team's gonna sign with them, so they'll probably just pull out
It's only hurting their image at this point — better to just pull out cleanly
even with the Cygnet, an OEM rebadge that flopped, they were still complaining about Toyota
if the chassis is bad you're still dead slow.
Same story for Cadillac running the Ferrari PU.
Williams had a golden era and has been stuck in a long slump since, but they've kept at it, huh
With a Mercedes engine they'd normally be fighting for the top
Mercedes already has a full roster of customer teams,
and worse, they've said the burden's too much and want to cut the number of teams they supply
I like F1 and root for Honda, but that doesn't make me want to buy a Honda car.
I drive a Toyota myself
Even if Mercedes supplied them PUs with works-team treatment, I doubt they'd become podium regulars from year one.
Though since Mercedes bundles the gearbox too, that'd help a lot.
Actually, can a perpetual midfield team really just whip up a gearbox that easily, when they used to have it supplied by the PU maker?
I saw an article — last year, I think — saying they poached a Red Bull engineer for the gearbox
F1 was at its most fun back when Ukyo Katayama was landing podiums.
Today's F1 keeps flip-flopping on the rules and it's boring
then it turned out to be just a digest — what a letdown
And here they are selling ¥30 million cars
Isn't Rolls-Royce the only British maker that actually builds engines?
The ones who'd be happiest about a withdrawal are probably the young guys in-house
The F1 engines are built by HRC, Honda's racing-specialist arm, so even if they pull out of F1, those engineers would probably just get reassigned to another racing program
Even back in their Mercedes days, by the final season they were barely scraping into 10th-place fights
It's not just the PU — they used to run a Mercedes-made gearbox too, but this year is the first time they've fitted an in-house one.
That's still causing problems even now.
British teams have always had this habit of blaming the other manufacturer's parts even when the problem is with their own components
"Taka-san, give me my helmet back" (a running in-joke quote)
That kind of thing is exactly what's behind the gap between Ferrari and Honda today
Sometimes you just need to let things cool off for a while
They should co-develop one with Jaguar, Rolls-Royce, or Cosworth instead
Isn't that literally what Aston Martin is for?
Was it Honda announcing their own withdrawal, then turning around and saying 'actually, we'll keep going'?
It was a free supply deal, and when Honda asked to get paid, the deal got torn up 🥹
The bubble-era generation survivors are starting to retire,
and the Ice Age generation (Japan's 'employment ice age' cohort hit by the hiring freeze of the 90s-2000s) is small in numbers,
so the pool of people who've built up institutional knowledge is probably shrinking
Background and Key Points
Aston Martin’s power-unit history is more tangled than the headline suggests. The team (formerly Racing Point/Force India, owned by Lawrence Stroll) ran Mercedes engines and gearboxes from its 2021 rebrand through 2025. For 2026, F1 introduced all-new power-unit regulations (roughly 50% electrical power, sustainable fuel), and manufacturers reshuffled partnerships around that reset. Honda, which had technically “withdrawn” from F1 after 2021 while quietly continuing to build Red Bull’s engines through its racing subsidiary HRC, used the 2026 rules to re-enter as a full factory partner — but Red Bull chose to build its own engine instead, so Honda paired exclusively with Aston Martin. That deal is only months old, which is what makes a reported switch back to Mercedes so startling: works PU contracts are normally multi-year, and Aston Martin would also need to rebuild its own gearbox program, having only just brought that in-house this season after years of using Mercedes-supplied units.
The thread’s real disagreement is whether the slump is even a Honda problem at all — several posters point to Williams (Mercedes PU) and Cadillac (Ferrari PU) still being slow, arguing a customer engine doesn’t fix a weak chassis, against others who take the switch talk at face value as an indictment of Honda.
What’s easy to miss: this is Spanish outlet Sport’s speculation off two motorhome visits, not a confirmed deal — and Mercedes itself has said it wants fewer customer teams, not more, making a near-term switch logistically dubious regardless of performance.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geino/Sports Express+) thread “[F1] Shockwave! Aston Martin considering switch from Honda to Mercedes, “supply deal reportedly under discussion” — foreign media report.”
Leave a Reply