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Aston Martin have admitted that Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll will not be able to complete even half race distance at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix this weekend for fear of suffering permanent nerve damage because of a vibration problem with their car.
The team principal Adrian Newey, who also designed the team’s new car, revealed on Thursday in the Melbourne paddock that both drivers were suffering such severe vibration through the steering wheel that they would only be able to complete 25 and 15 laps respectively.
“That vibration into the chassis is causing a few reliability problems, mirrors falling off, tail lights falling off, all that sort of thing, which we are having to address,” he said.
“But the much more significant problem with that, is that vibration is transmitted ultimately into the driver’s fingers. Fernando is of the feeling that he can’t do more than 25 laps consecutively before he will risk permanent nerve damage into his hands. Lance [who has had several wrist injuries] is of the opinion that he can’t do more than 15 laps before that threshold.”
The vibration is being caused in the engine and then amplified across the chassis of the car and while engine manufacturer Honda has attempted to employ “counter-measures”, they do not solve the problem.
Alonso, who was publicly dismissive when he endured an underperforming Honda engine at McLaren between 2015 and 2017, also shared his concerns.
“The vibrations coming from the engine are hurting a little bit the components in the car and as drivers we feel them,” he said. “We feel our body with this frequency of the vibrations that you feel after 20 or 25 minutes a little bit numb.
“It shouldn’t be there and we don’t know the consequences either if you keep driving like that for months. So a solution has to be implemented.”
The striking revelation is a hammer blow to Aston Martin, who had already been struggling in pre-season testing. The car was not ready to run for the full three days in Barcelona and at the two subsequent tests in Bahrain their running was severely curtailed with reliability problems centred around the Honda engine. It now appears the drivers could not physically drive the car for a full stint because of the vibration.
Speaking for the first time publicly this season, Newey broke the news in the team’s hospitality, where he was joined by Koji Watanabe, president of Honda racing. Honda are returning to the sport as an engine manufacturer this season but at their engine launch earlier this year had conceded that they had not achieved the targets they had hoped for, with testing suggesting the engine was underpowered and unreliable.
Surprisingly Newey also admitted he had not yet even fully discussed the issue of the vibration with Watanabe.
“There’s no point in [not] being open and honest in this meeting, of our expectations,” said Newey. “It’s something that unfortunately Koji and I haven’t had a chance to discuss properly prior to this meeting, but we are going to have to be very restricted on how many laps we do in the race, until we get on top of the source of the vibration.”
Watanabe could not give a timeline of when they issue would be fixed but with the Chinese GP following in a week, it seems unlikely Aston Martin will be able to complete that race either. “We are working together as one team and further measures are already under consideration,” he said. “But we are not able to share that technical detail, so we ask for your patience as we continue working toward unlocking full performance potential.”
The revelation comes in the year Aston Martin had been hoping to make the step up to join the front runners on the grid. Under the ownership of the billionaire Lawrence Stroll, the father of Lance Stroll, there has been a huge investment in the team. They have built a brand new factory and wind tunnel facility at Silverstone and brought Newey on board from Red Bull, a huge coup as he is recognised as the pre-eminent designer of the modern F1 era. He has won titles with three different teams, Williams, McLaren and Red Bull and was made team principal of Aston Martin at the end of last year.
This is the most serious issue any of Newey’s cars have encountered but he remained optimistic the issue would be resolved and that the car had potential. Nonetheless there was also a suggestion that there had been no little disconnect between Honda and Aston Martin.
“The positive out of this is that our relationship has strengthened the relationship between Honda and AMR, we are working very much as a partnership now,” he said. “That’s good, clearly, and I think we are able to help each other.”
