Mar.8 (GMM) Fernando Alonso has made clear that Aston Martin will not hesitate to retire from Sunday’s Australian GP at the first sign of battery trouble, with the team’s participation in next week’s Chinese Grand Prix hanging in the balance.
“It’s no secret that we don’t have spare batteries,” Alonso said. “At the slightest anomaly in the telemetry data, we’ll have to stop the car in order to race in China.”
Honda Racing senior managing director Ikuo Takeishi, speaking to the Japanese media, confirmed that both remaining batteries were still operational after Saturday’s running but acknowledged the team had arrived in Melbourne with only four units due to production constraints.
“The honest answer is that we were only able to prepare four units due to production volume issues,” he said. Asked whether China would be similarly constrained, he replied: “We would like to take measures wherever possible at Sakura.”
Takeishi said the vibration situation had improved enough to ease restrictions on battery usage during Saturday’s practice. “The vibrations have calmed down quite a bit, so we’re not imposing any strict restrictions,” he said, though he declined to detail what monitoring remained in place.
“I can’t go into details, but we are monitoring the condition of the batteries and doing various other things.”
Alonso struck a more optimistic note about the underlying chassis, pointing to a remarkable jump in pace achieved simply through running more laps. “Yesterday we were four seconds off the pace, and today we were three. We haven’t changed anything – we’ve only improved by a second and a half because we were able to get some laps in.”
He said the progress vindicated his belief in the car’s potential. “We’ve had a session and a half of car development and we’ve improved by a second and a half. That tells you the potential.”
He also admitted the scale of what remains to be unlocked. “If we had three or four normal Grand Prix races, I think there’s still another second or so of chassis to unlock, just by running more and understanding the dynamics. But once that’s fixed, we’d still have two seconds left, which seem difficult to recover.”
Team owner Lawrence Stroll said on the Melbourne grid on Sunday that Honda’s problems had been “unexpected”.
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