In its Mexico Grand Prix preview, Honda’s Shintaro Orihara had described Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez as “a very challenging track for the power unit”, but he perhaps didn’t expect Aston Martin’s weekend to go so awry.
Despite decent pace and mileage in free practice – Fernando Alonso was just 0.769s down on pacesetter Charles Leclerc in FP2, with the AMR26s covering a whopping 144 laps across all three sessions – it all went wrong in the competitive sessions.
