There have been rumours for days that Aston Martin may be unable to finish the Melbourne Grand Prix this weekend, but even after a challenging week of testing in Bahrain, that seemed a tad far-fetched. Or not, as it happens.
Team Principal Adrian Newey has confirmed that vibrations from Aston Martin's troublesome Honda engine risk causing permanent nerve damage to their drivers within less than half the race distance.
"That vibration into the chassis is causing a few reliability problems," Newey told the press in Australia today. "Mirrors falling off, tail lights falling off - all that sort of thing, which we are having to address. But the much more significant problem 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 to his hands," the former Red Bull Racing engineer explained. "Lance [Stroll] is of the opinion that he can't do more than 15 laps before that threshold."
"There's no point in not being open and honest in this meeting on our expectations," Newey continued. "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."
It seems the car design isn't the problem, as the engine is sending vibrations throughout the entire chassis. While it sounds like Aston Martin has fixed the car's reliability problems by preventing those vibrations from reaching the battery, the negative impact on the drivers is significant.
According to Alonso, his hands and feet feel "numb" after driving the AMR26. He added, "If we were fighting for the win, we can do three hours in the car, let's be clear. But definitely it is something that is unusual. It shouldn't be there. We don't know the consequences either if we keep driving like that for months. So a solution has to be implemented."
Stroll went one step further by saying it feels like being strapped into an electric chair, and Newey puts the problems down to a condensed development period.
By the time he was free from his Red Bull contract, it was already March 2025, and his design philosophy was vastly different from the one previously implemented by Aston Martin. By the time the car got into the team's new wind tunnel, they were at least four months behind rivals in terms of aerodynamic development.
On a more positive note, Newey concluded, "Do I believe in our partners and Honda's ability to bring that power up and to be competitive? Absolutely. They have a proven track record, and we have total faith."
"The car has huge, tremendous development potential in it. It will take, of course, a few races for us to fully realise that potential. I see no inherent reason within the architecture of the car why we can't become, on the chassis side, close to if not fully competitive."