2026 F1 Thread

kookaburra75 said:
The observations about Aston Martin are news to me.
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Hadn't heard about them potentially retiring early, but I guess it will depend on whether they've sorted the vibration issues and also how many spare parts they've got on hand. This early in the season you wouldn't want to be damaging too much....
 
Further to the reports of Aston Martin considering to retire early from the Australian GP....


Key paragraphs...

Honda is completely unprepared for the Australian Grand Prix, with multiple engine failures in Bahrain jeopardising spare parts supplies, to the extent Aston Martin considered skipping Melbourne by invoking force majeure. But this would have been a PR disaster for F1 as its new technical era begins, and Aston would have had to pay compensation for breaking the Concorde Agreement’s terms. The AMR26s will be in Australia, but only intend to make the 107% rule to qualify for the grid and race for a few laps before retiring.
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Aston’s chief strategy officer Andy Cowell, who led Mercedes’ F1 engine department to multiple world titles, has been sent to Japan, but time is running out to restore basic reliability before even working on performance. Newey is believed to have sarcastically commented that Honda’s internal combustion engine wasn’t powerful enough to recharge the battery – it reportedly lacks some 80hp in those conditions.
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The disaster is undermining Aston Martin’s image, after billionaire Lawrence Stroll invested heavily in state-of-the-art facilities in Silverstone and key staff hires including team principal and tech chief Newey.
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Sounds like the team is in a whole world of pain right now. On the plus side, this has all the makings of a very amusing Lollipop Man F1 video!! 😜
 
I was reading that some of the team travel arrangers themselves were caught out midair by the war (aka enroute to ME as hostilities started) and managed to get a lot of the teams out of the area or onto alternative flights that turned around before the flights that they were on even landed back in Europe.

Seems a lot have rerouted via US. And those at Bahrain were land transported to Saudi before flying out of Saudi.
DejaBrew said:
Sounds like the team is in a whole world of pain right now. On the plus side, this has all the makings of a very amusing Lollipop Man F1 video!! 😜
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Speak of the devil...

 
Some pretty staggering details emerging from today's press conferences that detail the depth of the hole in which Aston Martin currently find themselves. 🤯

www.nytimes.com

Aston Martin F1 drivers at risk of nerve damage from car vibrations, will have laps capped in Australia

Aston Martin will retire early from the Australian Grand Prix due to an unsafe vibration in the car
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

Article is paywalled, so I'll quote the relevant sections...
Aston Martin team principal Adrian Newey confirmed Thursday that the Formula 1 team will likely be running limited laps during the Australian Grand Prix weekend due to a vibration issue in the chassis.
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While this has caused reliability issues, the bigger concern is the drivers’ health. There are concerns at Aston Martin about how many consecutive laps Lance Stroll and Fernando Alonso can do. Newey shared that Alonso, 44, believes he is unable to do more than 25 laps “before he will risk permanent nerve damage to his hands,” while Stroll, 27, can run 15 consecutive laps before reaching a similar threshold.”
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“We are going to have to be very heavily restricted on how many laps we do in the race,” Newey continued, “until we get on top of the source of the vibration and improve the vibration at the source.”
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“Aston Martin faced a condensed development period when creating the 2026 challenger, which Newey highlighted during his Thursday media session with Honda Racing Corporation president Koji Watanabe. The model wasn’t in the wind tunnel until mid-April, but Newey does feel there’s “huge, tremendous development potential in it,” though it’ll take time to realize that fully.”
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“We’ve got quite an aggressive development plan underway,” Newey continued. “So I think it’s fair to say that here in Melbourne, we are a bit behind the leaders. I would say we’re maybe the fifth-best team, so sort of potential Q3 qualifiers on the chassis side, obviously not where we want to be, but with the potential to be up front at some point in the season.”
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Watanabe, though, revealed that the vibration was “unexpected” and damaged the battery-related components in the power unit. Newey later said the vibration problems also included “a few reliability problems, mirrors falling off, tail lights falling off, all that sort of thing, which we are having to address.”
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...Newey sought the positives. He claimed the team’s chassis was the fifth-best on the grid, and that it had “tremendous” potential. The partnership with Honda had been strengthened as a result of the issues they’d encountered and the subsequent work.
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Countermeasures are in place for this weekend after Honda tested some fixes on its engine dyno in Japan over the past week. But it’s unclear just what impact they may have. Unless those fixes do seriously remedy the vibration issue, then Aston Martin’s race — in the best-case scenario — could only last almost half the race.
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elanshin said:
I was reading that some of the team travel arrangers themselves were caught out midair by the war (aka enroute to ME as hostilities started) and managed to get a lot of the teams out of the area or onto alternative flights that turned around before the flights that they were on even landed back in Europe.

Seems a lot have rerouted via US. And those at Bahrain were land transported to Saudi before flying out of Saudi.

Speak of the devil...

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I like that Medi sounds like Rebel Wilson
 
HAM: "Hey man, you said we can open our front and rear wings."
RUS: "Yes"
HAM: "Is there any rule that says how much I can open it?"
RUS: "No, you open it, it's open. How much more can you open it from open?"
HAM: "Like can I just open it? Or oooopen it? You know what I mean?

🤣🤣🤣
 
moa999 said:
Interesting the differing stated lap threshold between Alonso and Stroll
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Yeah, I had similar thoughts when I read that. Doesn't really reflect positively on STR (...unless it's related to the dual wrist breaks he suffered ahead of the start of last season).
 
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Surprised Lollipopman didnt make it into a joke of the red v green safety car.. no more Aston Martin this year - it's all red Mercedes AMG
 
moa999 said:
Surprised Lollipopman didnt make it into a joke of the red v green safety car.. no more Aston Martin this year - it's all red Mercedes AMG
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Didn’t they though? I mean… it was unspoken, but Safety Car left behind the green and yellow race suit and turned up for duty in the red one.
 

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