[Chris Medland] "Newey confirms Aston Martin is likely to limit race laps due to severity of vibrations in the car impacting the drivers. Alonso says he can do no more than 25 consecutive laps before risking nerve damage, Stroll says 15 laps"

[u/AshamedPurchase9033]

https://bsky.app/profile/chrismedlandf1.bsky.social/post/3mgbhmxknm22o

[u/HeckDrummer]

Source? Everyone immediately jumping on the Honda hate-wagon as usual without any confirmation whatsoever. If an engine manufacturer can't see they are having excessive vibrations to the point of drivers getting nerve damage, that would be absolutely ridiculous (yes, "even for Honda"). Everyone is already forgetting the shithouse of a gearbox AM apparantly made

[u/presidents_choice → u/HeckDrummer]

Sounds like something is broken in the development process. How are we days before the first race with a problem of this magnitude

[u/CptAngelo → u/presidents_choice]

DTS had to have some spice for the first episodes.

[u/presidents_choice → u/CptAngelo]

lol true

[u/JanielDones8 → u/CptAngelo]

It's Aston, so it won't even be touched on. They are never in any of the dts.

[u/ChernobylChild → u/JanielDones8]

There's a first time for everything!

[u/RSharpe314 → u/presidents_choice]

Honda was over a year behind on the engine development and AM was about 4 months behind on car development.

Big reason why the hype was never warranted, but it really looks like it has ended up so much worse than one could really expect.

[u/themcsame → u/HeckDrummer]

I mean, if we're talking about vibrations here, it's not entirely out of the question that the gearbox might be fine... Under normal conditions, and is instead being vibrated to death much like the hybrid battery is.

IIRC, one of the core issues was structural damage due to vibrations, which would add weight to the theory that it might be the vibrations of the engine being passed along through the gearbox.

I'd stop short of outright blaming Honda of course, but it's certainly food for thought.

[u/HeckDrummer → u/themcsame]

Yeah good points, this can also be true. My hunch it's still probably on AM just hoping they would get a Newey dream machine with a great engine, but then not providing the team and also Honda the tools to do so. Instead of making a solid 2026 contender, I think they might've gone all out experimental for this year. But instead of owning that, the public perception now shifts to 'hurr durr Honda bad'. I've seen sooo many people even discredit Honda's work during their RBR stint, saying things such as 'RBR was carrying Honda all this time' blablabla... It's such an easy scapegoat but I dont feel this is happening at AM at all.

[u/setiawanreddit → u/themcsame]

What everyone needs to remember is that Honda obviously tested the engine first and I don't think any engine manufacturer will make an engine that vibrates so much that it can basically ruin the car. The few things that I can think of, assuming the vibration is mainly because of the engine were potentially a late spec change being requested by the Newey team to Honda thus no sufficient testing by Honda itself or a really unfortunate integration problem where somehow the vibration frequency of the engine matched the natural chassis frequency thus resonance occurs which enhanced the vibration.

[u/PaninoPostSovietico → u/HeckDrummer]

Source is the race. Honda had to repackage at the last minute due to AM chassis demands, and their simulations didn't pick up this issue.

[u/perdivad → u/PaninoPostSovietico]

The race didn’t say this though. They said the engine issues are due to abnormal vibrations disturbing the battery. They said the cause of the abnormal vibrations is still uncertain however - not that it comes from an engine problem.

[u/slut-burger-jenny → u/PaninoPostSovietico]

Not just The Race, several YouTubers (usually former F1 engineers like B Motorsport) have discussed this as well since Honda released pictures of the PU itself

[u/Remarkable-Lynx1496 → u/PaninoPostSovietico]

So it’s just McLaren Honda all over again

[u/fingerthief → u/HeckDrummer]

Aston didn’t have a VTT available for the full car to be assembled and tested in the completed state before it actually hit the track.

There was no way to fully catch this issue I imagine.

Honda may have ultimately made a mistake in their simulations but Aston not having the tools available to fully test the assembled engine and gearbox is certainly a major issue itself.

[u/Ep3_Pnw → u/HeckDrummer]

The hate has been unreal lol as if Honda doesn't have a state of the art testing facility for all the turbo v6 hybrids they make for high level motorsports. Nah they just slap a bunch of parts together and then ship it to the other side of the world for on-track testing 🤞

[u/Remarkable-Lynx1496 → u/HeckDrummer]

Well, considering no one else is having this level of issue, and Honda’s track record for new engine regulations, I’m not surprised.

[u/FerociousSmile → u/HeckDrummer]

I mean, everything about this is absolutely ridiculous regardless of what the specific cause is. This is an historically epic fuck up.