Three days before the first race of the Formula 1 season, it is impossible to overstate just how badly the Aston Martin team, newly headed by racecar guru Adrian Newey, have managed to botch it. Any attempt to summarize from an outsider's perspective will mostly boil down to an incoherent, expletive-laden babble—"Oh my god, they fucked it, it is unbelievable just how much they fucked it," etc.—but it's more effective to hear the facts directly from the sources themselves.
Here are a few sentences Newey uttered in a 15-minute press conference (reportedly and fittingly plagued by microphone issues) prior to the Australian Grand Prix:
- "The 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."
- "Fernando [Alonso] is of the feeling that he can't do more than 25 laps consecutively before he risks permanent nerve damage to his hands."
- "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."
What exactly do the vibrations feel like from the driver's perspective? Well, here's Lance Stroll, whose personal limit on laps is 15, on the subject, "I guess just, like, electrocute yourself in a chair or something like that, and it's not far off."
The question of how, exactly, Aston Martin has stumbled into producing a car that effectively turns the cockpit into an electrocution simulator for its drivers and has parts of the car falling off and "all that sort of thing," has yet to be precisely answered. But while the root cause has still to be diagnosed, the problem itself is well understood: Some combination of the car's chassis, engine, and gearbox produces abnormal vibrations in the car that, on top of the aforementioned issues, are also damaging the car's battery package. A lack of spare parts resulted in severely abbreviated mileage for the team during F1 Testing in Bahrain; while other teams completed upwards of 300 or even 400 laps, Aston Martin only managed 128.
Aston Martin is working with a new engine provider this year in Honda, and both parties are vaguely pinballing the blame between each other. Newey is maintaining that the chassis side of the car is in the top half of the grid and is still hoping for good performance during qualifying. He also reportedly remarked in private that the issues with the Honda engine extended beyond vibrations, and that the engine's regeneration capabilities were severely limited. Honda later said that the numbers—that the engine could not recover energy while the kinetic Motor-Generator Unit (MGU-K, a device that can either harvest current from the car's battery to power the crankshaft or draw energy from the crankshaft's rotation to charge the battery) ran at 250 kW, much less the maximum 350 kW under the new regulations—were taken out of context from the run plan.
This is not the first time that Honda has had severe reliability and performance issues crop up in preseason testing. The McLaren–Honda days of 2015–17 were infamously disastrous for all parties involved, and the finishing touch on this entire situation is the shared factor of one Fernando Alonso. Astute readers will note that Alonso, who drove for McLaren from 2015 to 2018, a decade later has somehow once again found himself in an unreliable car with a Honda engine. Apparently, he just can't outrun the sound of the woman who loved him—or, anyway, the engine manufacturer that is causing his car to vibrate enough to risk permanent nerve damage.
