Aston Martin's nightmare with Honda has been well documented, but it's even worse than it seemed. The Honda-powered cars are not only slower and unreliable, but also dangerous for the drivers because of chassis vibrations, that are putting Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll's hands at risk.
Adrian Newey, Aston Martin team principal, spoke just before the first Grand Prix of the season in Australia, and he is bracing for the worst: it seems that drivers cannot complete more than 15 or 25 laps without risking permanently damaging the nerves in their hands, due to chassis vibration. The vibrations of the Honda engine cause reliability problems (failures in the batteries and even mirrors and tail lights falling off), but more importantly, is posing a risk to the drivers Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll.
"The much more significant problem is that the 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 to his hands. Lance is of the opinion that he can't do more than 15 laps before that threshold", said Newey (via BBC).
Honda has added some countermeasures to stop vibration, but according to Koji Watanabe, they will only know if they work when the cars start running again on Friday. And Alonso said that "if we were fighting for the win, we can do three hours in the car, let's be clear. But definitely it is something that is unusual, it shouldn't be there", and asked for a solution because he doesn't know the consequences will be if he keeps doing it for months.
Adrian Newey has already warned that they will be very limited on how many laps they can do until the problem is solved, but it seems clear that Fernando Alonso will have to wait before he can really start fighting for race wins... maybe even race finishes.