Aston Martin have admitted that Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll will be unable to complete even half the race 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, said the drivers were suffering such severe vibration through the steering wheel that they would be able to complete 25 and 15 of the 58 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. While the engine manufacturer, Honda, has attempted to employ “countermeasures”, 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 on the engine. It now appears the drivers could not physically drive the car for a full stint because of the vibration. Newey also admitted he had not yet even fully discussed the issue of the vibration with Koji Watanabe, president of Honda racing. “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 the 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 frontrunners on the grid. This is the most serious issue any of Newey’s cars have encountered, but he remained optimistic the problem would be resolved and that the car had potential.
