Adrian Newey, team principal of Aston Martin, revealed that drivers Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll will have a limited number of laps to run this weekend to avoid the risk of permanent damage to the nerves in their hands.
This measure, which comes just before the start of the Australian GP, was taken due to the intense vibrations caused by the Honda engine in the team’s cars. “What we achieved for this weekend [was a solution] that was tested on the dynamometer […] which significantly reduced the vibration transmitted to the battery,” explained Newey.
“But it’s important to remember that the power unit is the source of the vibration — it’s the amplifier. The chassis, in this case, is the receiver. A carbon chassis is a naturally stiff structure with very little damping, so we haven’t made any progress in preventing that vibration from being transmitted to the chassis.”
“We will have to significantly limit the number of laps we run in the race until we identify the source of this vibration and manage to reduce it,” he added in the interview.
Alonso is expected not to run more than 25 consecutive laps with the AMR26 without risking damage to the nerves in his hands, while Stroll will likely have an even lower limit of just 15 laps.
The Honda Racing representative, Koji Watanabe, emphasized that “engineers are working to develop and evaluate several countermeasures for the problems detected during the pre-season tests” held in Bahrain in February.
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