Aston Martin’s disastrous start to the new Formula One season grew even worse after free practice in Australia with the team principal, Adrian Newey, revealing there were now fears they would not be able to take part in Saturday’s qualifying or Sunday’s race at the Albert Park circuit.
On Thursday Newey had hosted an extraordinary press conference, at which he had admitted that a severe vibration issue with the team’s Honda engine meant their drivers were in danger of receiving permanent nerve damage through the steering wheel. Newey said Fernando Alonso believed he could manage only 25 laps in the car and his teammate Lance Stroll only 15, both well short of half the 58-lap race distance in Melbourne.
After only one practice session here, Newey conceded it might yet be a moot point, as the team were down to their last two battery units for their hybrid engines and if they had any problems there were no further replacements. “The critical point is the number of batteries,” he said. “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.
“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 relationship with Honda appears to have already been stretched to breaking point as Newey disconsolately admitted the engine manufacturer had no other battery units, when asked if more could be flown in. “Unfortunately not, there aren’t any,” he said.
The woe for Aston Martin had begun from the off in first practice, when Alonso was unable to even take to the track because of the battery problem and Stroll completed only three laps before he too retired with the same problem. In the second session they at least managed to reach the full hour with both batteries intact, albeit only completing limited runs, five seconds off the pace and with Stroll brought in with an unidentified problem.
Newey admitted on Friday there would be no quick fix to the vibration problem that has stymied their start to the season, suggesting it could well be many meetings before their car might even be able to complete a race distance. He somewhat surprisingly revealed that Aston Martin had been unaware of the make-up of the Honda engine team when they agreed a works deal with the manufacturer.
Honda had pulled out of F1 in 2021, at which point they had successfully delivered a championship-winning engine to Red Bull with which Max Verstappen would go on to win the title. The marque then re-entered at the end of 2022 but the original group had been disbanded and many of the new team assembled for the Aston Martin project were new to F1.
Newey said of the situation: “We only really became aware of it kind of November of last year when we, Lawrence [Stroll, the team owner], Andy Cowell and myself went to Tokyo to discuss rumours starting to suggest that their original target power they wouldn’t achieve for race one and out of that came the fact that many of the original workforce had not returned when they restarted.”
On track in Melbourne the true pecking order remained unclear, as the teams built towards Saturday’s qualifying. The Ferraris of Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton topped the time sheets in first practice, from Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar, with George Russell and Kimi Antonelli in seventh and eighth for Mercedes. In the afternoon, the local hero Oscar Piastri was quickest for McLaren, in front of Antonelli, Russell, Hamilton, Leclerc, Verstappen and Lando Norris, in the second McLaren.
