Are Aston Martin set to announce engine partnership with Honda?

According to a report by Italian publication La Gazzetta dello Sport, Aston Martin will announce the partnership with Honda on Wednesday.

The collaboration from 2026 has been mooted over the last few months, with Aston Martin seeking a ‘works deal’ to ensure they have the best chances of title glory.

It will mean that Honda return to F1 after deciding to leave it in 2021.

Despite their rapid improvement and later success with Red Bull, Honda decided to quit the sport on the eve of Max Verstappen's title triumph against Lewis Hamilton.

At the time, they said that its industry was undergoing a "once-in-one-hundred-years period of great transformation" and it was pursuing "carbon neutrality by 2050" using "future power-unit and energy technologies, including fuel-cell vehicle and battery technologies".

Red Bull continue to run Honda engines in their car - with the power unit arguably the class of the field in F1 2023.

With Aston Martin eying championship-success, the potential partnership with Honda makes perfect sense.

It means they’re no longer a Mercedes customer team and thus they can fully integrate the Honda package.

One interesting aspect of the deal is Fernando Alonso.

While he might not be part of the team come 2026, his relationship with Honda was damaged following a torrid spell with McLaren between 2015 and 2017.

The Spaniard famously described Honda's F1 power unit as a "GP2 engine" - embarrassing the brand at their home race at Suzuka in 2015.