If you’re driving in an F1 race and hitting speeds of 220 mph (354 kph), you really don’t want parts of the car falling off as you hurtle along, or, more importantly, to suffer nerve damage because of a problem with your vehicle.
But that’s exactly what’s happening with Aston Martin’s car, leaving drivers Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll unlikely to finish the first race of the new F1 season in Australia on Sunday.
In testing, the car, powered by a Honda engine, has been vibrating so badly that parts of it have been dropping off, with the vibrations reaching the drivers, too.
The issue surfaced as teams adapt to new engine rules designed to boost efficiency and sustainability in a change that forced widespread redesigns in recent months.
While Honda supplies the power units that may be contributing to the vibration problem, Aston Martin’s chassis design and setup affect how the vibrations reach the drivers, making it a problem rooted in both engine performance and car design.
Engineers have been working to reduce the vibrations, but it seems unlikely that Alonso and Stroll will be able to complete Sunday’s race.
“That vibration into the chassis is causing a few reliability problems,” Aston Martin team principal Adrian Newey said in comments to the media on Thursday, adding that the problem includes “mirrors falling off, tail lights falling off.”
Newey said “the much more significant problem is that the vibration is transmitted ultimately into the driver’s fingers. So Fernando [Alonso] is of the feeling that he can’t do more than 25 laps consecutively before he will risk permanent nerve damage to his hands. Lance [Stroll] is of the opinion that he can’t do more than 15 laps before that threshold.”
Commenting on the unusual situation on Thursday, Alonso said, “For us it’s just vibrating everything. But it’s not only for us, I think the car is shrugging a little bit. The vibrations coming from the engine are hurting a little bit the components in the car and the drivers; we feel them, we feel our body with this frequency of the vibrations that you feel after 20 or 25 minutes, a little bit numb.”
It’s certainly a bizarre turn of events. While there have been instances in the past of F1 drivers riding in an uncomfortable condition, this appears to be the first time that a team is facing cutting a race short due to health risks from vibrations.