Honda's reliability crisis deepened in Brazil when Lance Stroll retired with the second battery failure of the weekend, and the Japanese manufacturer admits it may not find the root cause before season's end. Stroll has finished just six of twenty races; teammate Fernando Alonso seven retirements. Honda's lead trackside engineer Shintaro Orihara confirmed "we know what happened, but we don't know what is the root cause" — a worrying echo of the cooling-system failure that killed Alonso's Mexico race. This marks a regression from mid-season, when both Aston Martins strung together multiple finishes and Alonso scored points. The timing compounds Honda's problems: troubleshooting burns dyno hours and engineering bandwidth that should be locked on the 2027 power unit, which already faces a modest development roadmap. Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe witnessed the weekend's failures firsthand. The pressure now shifts to Las Vegas, where Honda must implement a band-aid fix while hunting the underlying fault.
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