The Aston Martin team boss says Honda’s vibrating engine is affecting the health of Aston's drivers.
Aston Martin’s Formula 1 team principal and technical guru Adrian Newey threw a curve ball at the Australian Grand Prix on Thursday—and in the view of some observers, he also appeared to throw power unit supplier Honda under the bus.
Thursday was the first chance for the media to meet Newey since the AMR26’s disastrous performance in winter testing. Over three sessions in Barcelona and Bahrain, the stunning-looking car completed few laps, and didn’t run at a competitive pace. Honda admitted it had serious issues restricting both performance and mileage; that was eventually clarified as a serious vibration triggered by the power unit, with one good source narrowing it down to the MGU-K. That vibration was serious enough to break components on the car, and specifically the battery casing. Hence, the lack of mileage.
Even in the rarified world of F1, engine mods do not happen overnight. So the focus ahead of the first race in Australia was mainly on the battery installation in an effort to stop it falling apart, along with beefing up other fragile areas. But the inherent vibration could not yet be addressed.
In a packed media session, and with Honda F1 boss Koji Watanabe sitting alongside (and not looking very comfortable), Newey provided more details, initially in response to a question from Road & Track about whether the vibration had been fully understood and what the response was. “What is important to remember is effectively the PU, the combination of the ICE and possibly the MGU as well, is the source of the vibration,” he said. “It's the amplifier. The chassis is, in that scenario, the receiver."
"A carbon chassis is a naturally stiff structure with very little damping—so the transmission of that vibration into the chassis, we haven't made any progress on. So that vibration into the chassis is causing a few reliability problems: mirrors falling off, taillights falling off, all that sort of thing, which we are having to address.”
Having put the ball very firmly in Honda's court, he added: “But the much more significant problem with that is that [the] vibration is transmitted, ultimately, into the driver's fingers. So Fernando [Alonso] 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 [Stroll] is of the opinion that he can't do more than 15 laps before that threshold.”
“We are going to have to be very heavily restricted on how many laps we do in the race until we get on top of the source of the vibration and improve the vibration at source,” Newey said.
Suffice it to say, this new information put a whole fresh twist on the saga—Honda’s vibrating engine could leave Alonso with permanent injury! The Spaniard later tried to downplay things, saying he wasn’t in pain that would stop him from driving, but rather he had a “numb” feeling that led to concerns about having to deal with those conditions in the cockpit for too long. It was all slightly surreal, and became more so when Newey suggested that the Aston Martin—as in the chassis—was potentially the fifth-fastest car at the moment, when testing showed it, with Honda power, to be the slowest.
Despite the ongoing drama, Alonso said he still has faith in Honda—and to be fair the company does tend to get things right eventually. The question now is how long it will take, because on the weekend he celebrates his 25th anniversary in F1, Alonso knows he doesn’t have much time to waste…
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Category: General Sports
