Fernando Alonso has said Aston Martin can compete with rivals on the opening laps of races this season but then loses out in what he calls the “battery world championship.”
Aston Martin has made a slow start to Formula 1’s new regulations as it has battled reliability issues with its new Honda power unit since it first ran in preseason testing.
Vibrations from the Honda engine damaged multiple batteries during preseason testing and forced Alonso to retire from Sunday’s Chinese Grand Prix after he started losing feeling in his hands and feet.
One small positive from the opening two races has been Alonso’s starts after he climbed from 17th to tenth on the first lap in Australia and from 18th to tenth in China.
However, the underlying issues of the Honda power unit means he has been unable to maintain those positions before retiring from both races.
“Yeah, the starts are a fun,” he said after the Chinese Grand Prix. “Same as in Australia, the car seems to start really well.
“On lap one it’s true that we all have the same level of battery, which is full. Then we enter in this battery world championship and in that we are not as good as the others.”
The opening two races have been an eye-opener for Aston Martin, but Alonso is hopeful Honda can make some progress with its power unit ahead of its home race in Japan on March 29.
“Obviously, from Australia to China, we only had five days, so the engine was exactly the same as in Australia,” he said. “Now we have two weeks, so we need more time [testing the engine] in the dyno.
“We need to give Honda more time to understand the vibrations and where they come from. And probably we fix the battery isolation, even though I think Lance [Stroll] had a problem also today, so I don’t know exactly what was the problem.
“But yeah, all in all, we need to give Honda more time.”
Although Honda has brought countermeasures to its power unit to protect the battery from vibrations, fixing the root cause of the problem remains the team’s priority.
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Head of trackside engineering Mike Krack underlined the progress made since preseason testing, but could not sugarcoat the challenge the team still faces.
“I think that this is difficult,” he said. “Obviously everybody is flat out working on that.
“If we go ten days back, we were speaking about six laps, and then we found solutions to the problem, especially for the most exposed point, which was the battery at that point.
“So I think, as I said, when you go ten days back and you see we have done all the sessions, the car was out at the start of the session, the car did never stop on track, so there has been progress.
“It’s obviously not a performance progress, we need to be honest with ourselves, but I think we have now a couple of days more to work on that, and I’m quite sure that we will come up with further improvements. Now to give you a final timeline on when, it’s very difficult to say.”
