Adrian Newey, the current team principal, has confirmed that the car is currently unable to complete more than 25 consecutive laps. According to him, it may even pose a risk to the drivers’ health.
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| Photo: Joe Portlock |
Adrian Newey revealed that the team will take part in the first race, but in a very limited mode. According to him, the drivers cannot complete the full race distance in the car, partly for health reasons. The Honda power unit is reportedly producing strong vibrations that could cause “permanent nerve damage in hands.”
"That 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," said Newey, quoted by Racingnews365.
"But the much more significant problem is that vibration is transmitted ultimately into the driver's fingers.
"So Fernando is of the feeling that he can't do more than 25 laps consecutively before he will risk permanent nerve damage in his hands.
"Lance is of the opinion that he can't do more than 15 laps before that threshold.
"So I think there's no point in [not] being open and honest in this meeting, on our expectations," he added.
"It's something that, unfortunately, Koji [Watanbe, president of Honda Racing Corporation] and I haven't had a chance to discuss properly before this meeting.
"But 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 and improve the vibration at source."
Fernando Alonso also spoke about the problems during the media day before the Australian Grand Prix. “It’s not painful. It's not difficult to control the car. The adrenaline is just way higher than any pain. If we were fighting for the win, we can do three hours in the car. Let's be clear.
“I think that overcomes anything when you are in the car. You don't have a limitation that will stop you from feeling the car or what you’re doing. Definitely it is something that is unusual.
“It shouldn't be there. We don't know the consequences either if you keep driving like that for months. A solution has to be implemented.”
At the same time, he revealed that Honda had already applied certain solutions to the car.
“The vibrations coming from the engine are hurting a little bit the components in the car,” said Alonso.
“The drivers, we feel our body with this frequency of the vibrations that you feel after 20 or 25 minutes.
“A little bit numb, I think is the word, on your hands or your feet or whatever.
“It has been a challenge, but every day in Sakura [Honda’s R&D base] they try to find solutions. I think since Bahrain there were a couple of tests done.
“Some of the solutions are implemented on the car now. I have 100% faith that Honda will fix the problems because they did it already in the past. They will always be competitive and a top engine in Formula 1.”
This is not the dream start of the Honda and Aston Martin partnership yet, the question remains how quickly Honda can solve the problems, after all, the competition is not asleep and with each race it can move further away from them and returning to the fight with the other teams can be increasingly difficult.