Posted on 03/05/2026 6:29:11 AM PST by WhiteHatBobby0701
The team has endured a disastrous lead-up to the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, with a severe vibration plaguing its new AMR26.
That has caused trouble with its Honda battery and severely limited the number of laps able to be completed in pre-season testing.
Team principal Adrian Newey admitted earlier on Thursday that the issue is also having an impact on the drivers.
Newey revealed Alonso feels he “can’t do more than 25 laps consecutively before he will risk permanent nerve damage to his hands”, while Stroll has a 15-lap threshold.
The two drivers have subsequently given their perspectives of driving the car, with Stroll’s the most graphic.
“I guess just like, electrocute yourself in a chair or something like that, and it’s not far off,” he said.
“It’s a very uncomfortable vibration. It’s bad for the engine but it’s also bad for the human inside the car.
“We need to just get on top of it, but I think we will.”
Alonso also painted a grim picture of driving the car to date but is optimistic updates will improve it this weekend.
Newey had cautioned the team will continue to be “very heavily restricted on how many laps we do in the race until we get on top of the source of the vibration”.
“The vibrations coming from the engine are hurting the components in the car and the drivers, we feel them,” said Alonso.
“We feel our body with this frequency of the vibration that you feel after 20 or 25 minutes. A little bit numb, on your hands or your feet or whatever.
“Since Bahrain, there were a couple of tests done and some of the solutions are implemented on the car now.
“So curious to see what tomorrow we can improve and we can feel.”
Alonso stressed it’s “not difficult to control the car” and that “adrenaline is way higher than the pain” when behind the wheel.
“But definitely it is something that is unusual,” he added.
“It shouldn’t be there and we don’t know the consequences either, if you keep driving like that for months, so a solution has to be implemented.
“And as I said, everyone is trying every day in Japan to fix the things, so we are here to help as well.”
Stroll said whether he can withstand more than 15 laps behind the wheel at Albert Park “depends how much we’ve improved since Bahrain”.
“If we still have the same vibration issues we had with the car in Bahrain, it’s going to be hard to do much more than 10-15 laps,” he said.
“If we resolved those issues the last couple of weeks, then I think we can go much further into the race. Time will tell.”
I like Danica Patrick. But then, I’m a woman.
When I was in my early 30s, I managed the Lotus franchise in Chicago, knew Colin Chapman, Jim Clark, and their mechanic, Ray Parsons, young fellow who went on to be a driver back in Australia. Drove my own Elan from Evanston, nice Chicago suburb, to Indianapolis where my friends and I had terrific seats for the 500, courtesy of Chapman.
Of course I like or at least admire Danica Patrick. Nver wanted to be her though.
Just guessing, but it sounds like it could be the regenerative braking. More power is now coming from the electric, which will tend to run down the battery too quickly, so maybe they’re trying something new to try and charge the battery faster.
Is it turbocharged?
“sounds like it could be the regenerative braking”
The drive train gets half of its propulsive force from electric and half from ICE, so says the sparse documentation. A hybrid?
All F1 engines are turbocharged. Until this year’s rule changes they had a system that could spin the turbo up with an electric motor so the infamous “turbo lag” was non-existent. Starting this year, that system is outlawed so some turbo lag is back. It doesn’t affect the cars too much during the race because the electric part of the powertrain supplements the engine power. It is an issue a the start, however, because of the time it takes to get the turbo to spin up. To work around this, F1 has adopted a new start procedure to give 5 seconds for cars to rev their engines to get turbos up to speed before the lights go out and the race begins.
F1 list “Ping”
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