‘Mirrors falling off’, ‘nerve damage’: Newey reveals scale of Aston’s F1 problems

Well this is pretty extraordinary: Aston Martin F1 team principal Adrian Newey has revealed the team a) won’t finish the Australian Grand Prix this weekend, and b) could cripple its drivers with “permanent nerve damage” if it tried to. Good grief.

Aston registered the lowest mileage of any of the 11 teams in pre-season testing because of severe vibrations caused by its Honda engine, which only Aston is running this season.

That vibration is causing all manner of problems, not least that the battery is being shaken about like one of James Bond’s vodka martinis.

A countermeasure is being fitted for this weekend’s opening race in Melbourne, but the team has no idea if it’ll work and it won’t do a darn thing to protect Fernando Alonso or Lance Stroll in the cockpit.

“That vibration into the chassis is causing a few reliability problems. Mirrors falling off, taillights falling off, all that sort of thing,” Newey admitted. “But the much more significant problem with that is that vibration is transmitted ultimately into the drivers’ fingers.

“So 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 is of the opinion he can’t do more than 15 laps before that threshold.”

Blimey. Aston is also facing an uphill battle with an aero package that it knows isn’t competitive yet, but that’s being overshadowed by yet another major embarrassment for Honda, which appears to have dropped the ball for the second regulation overhaul in a row.

You’ll remember the last one in 2014, when Honda entered a year behind everyone else, arrived underpowered and unreliable, and spent half a decade catching up while putting McLaren through the worst run of results in its entire history. As Fernando remembers only too well…

And on top of being the cause of a string of failures in winter testing (we’re not calling it a ‘shakedown’ out of respect), Honda’s powertrain is once again thought to be significantly down on power.

“I think there’s no point not being open and honest in this meeting of our expectations,” continued Newey. “We are going 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.”

Double DNF incoming… sounds like it’ll be the first of many.