Three days before the first race of the Formula 1 season, it is impossible to overstate how much the Aston Martin team, newly led by race car expert Adrian Newey, has failed. Any attempt to summarize from an outsider’s perspective will mostly result in incoherent, profanity-laden gibberish. “Oh my god, they screwed up, I can’t believe how much they screwed up,” etc. But it’s more effective to hear the facts straight from the source.
Here are a few sentences uttered by Newey during his 15-minute press conference before the start of the Australian Grand Prix (said to have been suitably hampered by microphone issues):
- “Vibration into the chassis causes some reliability issues: mirrors falling off, tail lights falling off, all kinds of problems that we have to address.”
- “I don’t think Fernando (Alonso) can do more than 25 laps in a row before he suffers permanent nerve damage in his hand.”
- “Until we figure out what’s causing the vibration, we have to very strictly limit how many laps we do in the race.”
What exactly does vibration feel like from a driver’s perspective? Lance Stroll, who has a personal lap limit of 15, talks about the topic. “If you electrocute yourself on a chair or something like that, it’s not that far away.”
The question of how exactly Aston Martin ended up producing a car that effectively turns the cockpit into an electrocution simulator for the driver and causes parts of the car to fall off has yet to be precisely answered. However, while the root cause has not yet been diagnosed, the problem itself is well known. Some combinations of a car’s chassis, engine, and gearbox cause abnormal vibrations in the car, which, in addition to the problems previously mentioned, can also damage the car’s battery package. During F1 testing in Bahrain, a shortage of spare parts severely curtailed the team’s mileage. While other teams completed more than 300 to 400 laps, Aston Martin recorded only 128 laps.
Aston Martin is working with a new engine supplier in Honda this year, with both sides vaguely blaming each other. Newey maintains the car’s chassis side is in the top half of the grid and is hoping for a good performance during qualifying. He also reportedly privately stated that the problems with Honda engines go beyond vibration and that the engine’s regenerative capacity is severely limited. Honda later said the figures showing that the engine could not recover energy while the Kinetic Motor Generator Unit (MGU-K, a device that can collect current from the car’s battery to power the crankshaft or draw energy from crankshaft rotation to charge the battery), which operates at 250 kW, well below the maximum of 350 kW under the new regulations, were taken out of the context of the action plan.
This isn’t the first time Honda has encountered serious reliability and performance issues in preseason testing. The McLaren-Honda years of 2015-17 were notoriously disastrous for all parties involved, and the finishing touch to this whole situation is a shared element of Fernando Alonso. Astute readers will note that Alonso, who drove for McLaren from 2015 to 2018, somehow found himself once again with an unreliable car powered by a Honda engine a decade later. Apparently he can’t outrun the sounds of the woman who loved him, or, anyway, the sound of the engine manufacturer that makes his car vibrate enough to risk permanent nerve damage.
