Adrian Newey, team chief Aston Martinrevealed that drivers Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll will have a limited number of laps 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 Grand Prix, was taken because of the intense vibrations caused by Honda– the engine in the team’s cars. “What we achieved for this weekend [var en løsning] which was tested on the dynamometer […] and that significantly reduced the vibration transmitted to the battery,” Newey explained.
“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 this vibration from being transferred to the chassis.”
“We have to significantly limit the number of laps we do in the race until we identify the source of this vibration and manage to reduce it,” he added in the interview.
Alonso is not expected to be able to drive more than 25 consecutive laps with AMR26 without risking damage to the nerves in his hands, while Stroll is likely to have an even lower limit of just 15 laps.
The representative of Honda Racing, Koji Watanabestressed that “the engineers are working to develop and evaluate several countermeasures to the problems discovered during the pre-season tests”, which took place in Bahrain in February.
Images: Creative Commons. This content was created with the help of AI and reviewed by the editorial team.
