Adrian Newey says he feels “powerless” after Aston Martin’s issues with power unit provider Honda continued on Friday.
Two-time F1 world champion Fernando Alonso did not even take to the cockpit for first practice at the Australian Grand Prix on Friday, with a “suspected power unit” problem meaning he was left on the sidelines.
Aston team principal Newey detailed the myriad of problems the team are facing, not least the drivers being susceptible to “permanent nerve damage” if they run a certain number of consecutive laps. As such, their participation in Sunday’s 58-lap race remains highly doubtful.
Speaking in the FIA press conference on Friday, Newey doubled down on the issues Aston faces and detailed the toll the saga is taking on the team.
“It’s not going to be a quick fix,” he said. “It involves fundamental balancing we need to conduct. I can’t comment how quickly we can achieve that, because that has to be the main drive.
“Once they’ve got past that, then they can really start to concentrate on things. But at the moment, this is sucking all energy in every area.
“Emotionally, I mean our mechanics were up until 4am this morning. Of course, they’re on their knees. The factory has been offering lots of support, so it’s something we really need to try to get on top of as quickly as possible.”
Newey, the F1 design guru who was the linchpin in Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen’s dominant years at Red Bull, also revealed that the team only have two batteries available for this race in Melbourne. The vibrations from the engine are essentially impacting the batteries of the hybrid system.
“If we lose one of those then it’s obviously a big problem,” he added. “So we’ve got to be very careful on how we use the batteries.
“We came here with four batteries. We’ve had conditioning problems or communication problems with two of those batteries, which means as we sit here today, we’ve only got two operational batteries. And 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.
“I kind of feel a bit powerless because we’ve clearly got a very significant power-unit problem. And our lack of running then also means, at the same time, we’re not finding out about the car. So our information on the car itself is very limited because we’ve done so little running.
“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 to try to work with Honda and produce the best overall solution.”
Whether Alonso and teammate Lance Stroll can even participate in qualifying on Saturday and the race on Sunday remains to be seen. The pair only completed 25 laps combined in second practice on Friday.
