Aston Martin is to limit their laps at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix to avoid the risk of their drivers sustaining nerve damage from vibrations coming through the steering wheel, team principal Adrian Newey said yesterday.
Vibrations from the Honda-supplied power unit were transferring to the chassis and placing a strain on Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll’s fingers, Newey said.
“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 told reporters at Albert Park. “But the much more significant problem with that is that that vibration is transmitted ultimately into the driver’s fingers.”
Photo: AFP
“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,” he added. “Lance 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.”
Aston Martin have been plagued by reliability issues that severely limited their laps during winter testing.
The team had some success in reducing the impact of vibrations on the battery pack, which had affected the cars’ performance during testing, Newey said.
“The battery is the thing that we have been focusing on because that’s the critical item on life,” he added. “The transmission of that vibration into the chassis, we haven’t made any progress on.”
Honda HRC president Koji Watanabe said they were working to solve the power unit’s problems, but offered no timeline on a meaningful fix.
“I want to hurry up, but at this moment, it’s quite difficult to say when and how,” Watanabe told reporters.
Aston Martin finished seventh in the constructors championship last year.
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