Aston Martin facing ‘very fragile’ Honda battery situation in China

The Aston Martin Formula 1 team faces a “very fragile” situation regarding Honda’s battery allocation at this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix.

Aston Martin has endured a nightmare start to F1’s new era of regulations and is currently unable to complete a full race distance due to severe vibrations from Honda’s power unit that has led to fears Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll could suffer “permanent nerve damage”.

Additionally, technical issues left Aston Martin with only two batteries and no spares in Melbourne. Alonso retired after 21 laps, while Stroll completed 43 of the 58 laps but finished 15 laps down after a lengthy spell in the garage.

The situation regarding a shortage of parts is not understood to be much better heading into the second round of the season in China.

“I think it’s very fragile, the situation with the batteries,” Stroll admitted in response to a question from Crash.net.

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“Right now we’re battling a lot of issues. Even just doing lap is difficult, so it’s not a normal approach to a weekend, where you show up thinking about competing or fighting for points or whatever the car’s capable of.

“We’re just fighting to get the car on track, have a reliable package, where we can participate.”

Team-mate Alonso hoped Aston Martin would soon be in a position to have “a normal weekend”, but stressed the team still has “too many unknown issues”.

“We still have too many issues and too many unknown issues,” the two-time world champion said in Thursday’s FIA press conference.

“They are coming day after day from nowhere, so it seems we are not on top of the problems yet and that’s why it’s difficult to guess.

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“I hope by a couple of grands prix we can have a normal weekend.”

Aston Martin shuts down Honda battery talk

While Stroll was fairly open regarding Aston Martin’s battery situation, the team were more tight-lipped on the matter.

“We are trying to repair the battery. We saw some good progress in terms of repairing. I can’t say detail point, but we are keeping working hard to repair the battery,” Honda’s trackside general manager Shintaro Orihara said during a joint media briefing on Thursday. 

“So, maybe we can repair the battery, because that battery issue is not relating to vibration, just small things inside the battery.”

Pressed on how many batteries Honda has available this weekend, Orihara replied: “We can’t say the exact number, but we keep trying to repair the battery to get more spares. But, sorry, I can’t say the number.”

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Responding to a relentless stream of battery-related questions, Aston Martin’s chief trackside officer Mike Krack moved to shut down such talk.

“I think we should not… What is the point if we go on about the number of batteries? I don’t think that this is something that we should try to insist on, insist on and insist on,” he said.

“We have a situation that was disclosed in Melbourne, and I don’t think that we should continue on this battery number discussion, if you allow.”

Providing an update on the vibration issues, Orihara added: “We have found some progress on the vibration situation, and then still we keep working hard to reduce vibration.

“Still, reliability is our challenging point to improve. So still we are working hard in dialogue with Aston Martin, and then we found something, another countermeasure, so maybe we can try something.

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“Also, we have accumulated mileage in the race, so we learned something from the race event for the driveability and also energy management. So we implement that learning into our simulation system.”

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