Fernando Alonso has identified an erratic gearbox as Aston Martin's most urgent problem after a wretched Miami Grand Prix, declaring the car was "impossible to drive" and that the fix is now the top priority before the team flies to Canada.
Aston Martin entered Miami as the slowest car on the grid, and the weekend confirmed the gap is structural rather than circumstantial. Lance Stroll did not mince words about the AMR26's deficiencies.
"We have no downforce. We have no power," Stroll said. "So those are the things we need to work on."
For Alonso, however, the most pressing issue was a gearbox that behaved differently from one corner to the next, undermining everything he tried to do with the car.
"The biggest problem for me was the gearbox. It was impossible to drive," the two-time world champion explained.
He described a list of intermittent failures that read like an engineer's nightmare. "I lost sync in every braking point, I had no acceleration out of corners," Alonso said. "Sometimes I had push, sometimes I had rear locking. That was a bad surprise."
The symptoms add up to a control-software problem rather than a mechanical break, and Alonso made it clear that resolving it has now leapfrogged any aerodynamic work in the team's queue.
"That's the fix number one for Canada," he said. "With all these heavy brakings in Canada, we need to improve the gearbox behaviour."
It is the second time in as many races that the Aston Martin garage has been forced into a triage exercise. The team had spent the early part of the season fighting an unrelated vibration issue believed to be linked to its Honda power unit installation, and Alonso confirmed in Miami that this earlier problem now appears to be behind them.
Asked if the vibrations were finally gone, the Spaniard was emphatic. "Gone," he said. "I would say gone."
The new gearbox issue, however, is a reminder that Aston Martin's 2026 challenge is not a single tractable bug but a long list of teething pains attached to the largest organisational change of any team on the grid. Adrian Newey only formally took up his Aston Martin role this season, and chief trackside officer Mike Krack was honest about where that leaves them.
"We are still talking about modest results," Krack admitted.
That reality is also why Alonso has effectively written off the rest of the European stretch as far as upgrades go. He is no longer chasing pace gains he cannot exploit.
"There is not really any point to bring two tenths, three tenths, four tenths into the race track because you cannot capitalise [on] that in terms of results," he said.
The team's fix list for Montreal is therefore narrow but critical. Get the gearbox software stable, give Alonso and Stroll a car that responds the same way at every braking zone, and worry about lap time later. With Canada's heavy braking phases waiting, the cost of getting that wrong has rarely been more obvious.
---
*Originally published on [News Formula 1](https://newsformula.one/article/alonso-aston-martin-gearbox-impossible-drive-miami-canada). Visit for full coverage.*
