MELBOURNE, Australia – Aston Martin now fear they might not even have both cars racing at the Australian Grand Prix due to a lack of spare Honda engine batteries, which Adrian Newey admitted is “a scary place to be in”.
Aston Martin arrived in Melbourne with four Honda batteries but have encountered two separate issues ahead of the weekend.
The situation has only deepened the miserable hole the team finds itself in before a competitive session has even taken place.
Honda’s engine is underpowered, unreliable and, the team revealed on Thursday, causing such bad vibrations in the car drivers Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll fear permanent nerve damage in their hands if they complete too many laps.
Alonso did not take part in first practice due to a power unit issue, while Stroll only managed three laps before the team encountered similar on his car.
Speaking after that opening session, Newey admitted the team’s participation in the race itself is in doubt.
“The critical point is the number of batteries,” Newey said. “We came here with four batteries. We’ve had conditioning problems or communication problems with two of those batteries, which means we’ve, as we sit here today, only got two operational batteries.
“That, given our kind of rate of battery damage, is quite a scary place to be in. Obviously we’re hopeful that we can get through the weekend and start two cars and so on and so forth, but it’s very difficult to be concrete at the moment about that.”
The vibration issue has already forced Aston Martin to limit the laps it can complete in one stint.
The lack of spares has just added to the list of things for the team to worry about.
“I think realistically it’s just trying to manage the problem,” Newey added. “We are short on batteries. We’ve only got two batteries left, the two that are in the car. So we lose one of those, then it’s obviously a big problem. So we’ve got to be very careful on how we use the batteries.”
The obvious follow-up question was then put to Newey about whether Aston Martin could fly in spares from Honda’s Sakura factory in Japan ahead of qualifying on Saturday.
“Unfortunately not, there aren’t any,” was Newey’s frank reply.
Newey’s two appearances to the media this weekend have been remarkable, with clear blame being pointed at Honda for the team’s current situation.
Newey and the team believe their chassis is the fifth best on the grid, a point that has been repeatedly emphasised after he has spoken about Honda’s problems.
At one point, he said the team has not been able to do anywhere close to enough testing on the chassis itself as a result of their engine problems.
“I think it’s one where you kind of feel a bit powerless because we’ve clearly got a very significant PU problem and our lack of running then also means at the same time we’re not finding out about the car. So our information in the car itself is very limited because we’ve done so little running, and particularly running at low fuel. Because running at low fuel, fuel acts as a damper to the battery.
“So Honda have limited us very much to how much low fuel running we can do. It just becomes a self-feeding problem and of course it’s using a lot of energy in the human sense as opposed to the kilowatt sense on our part to try to work with Honda and to to produce the best overall solution. Because we can turn around and say that it’s not our problem, but it is our problem because ultimately the car is a combination of chassis and PU.”
