Adrian Newey admitted the rear suspension failure suffered by Lance Stroll on Friday was “unexpected”. It happened with around 20 minutes to go in first practice at the Hungarian Grand Prix on Friday, when the Canadian was suddenly forced to pull over at the side of the road having spun around on the exit of turn two.
The TV broadcast showed a clear problem at the back of his car as the rear-left tyre was pointing in an unusual angle as his car came to a stop on the outside of turn three. Immediately, there were concerns about the reliability of the vast array of upgrades introduced on both cars this weekend as Newey‘s first redesign debuted on track.
The damage could not be repaired in time for Stroll to get back out on track a few hours later. “Unfortunately, Lance will not participate in FP2. There has not been enough time to repair the damage from FP1,” read a statement from the team, issued one minute after the start of the second hour of Friday’s running.
Speaking between the two sessions in the official FIA press conference for team representatives, Newey said the failure was not actuallty related to any of the 16 changed parts of the Aston Martin car constituting the enormous upgrades he designed. “The area involved was actually not being changed,” he told reporters.
“We are short on spares because the cladding and so forth is different. So there are some minor changes in that area, but in that sense it is very unexpected. Until we have an understanding it’s difficult to comment further.”
Fernando Alonso was at least able to produce some obviously improved pace in that first hour of running. However, the oscillations from their Honda engines, a problem felt most keenly in the early weeks of this season before they managed to get on top of them, were present again, Alonso told during the session to stay away from the kerbs, though Newey insisted that instruction was more about trying to get the best data they could on the new parts.
He said: “Staying away from the kerbs, that is purely because we are acquiring aero data and when you are trying to acquire aero data, you do not want the disruption of kerbs thrown in, the inconsistency that corrupts the data. The oscillations, yes, that is really a question for Honda. They can see it on the data and they are working on the solution.”
A new Honda engine is expected after the summer break and Newey made it clear there is also more to come on the chassis side, hopefully by the Italian Grand Prix in early September but definitely before the end of that month. He added: “The provisional results are promising and it is only part of the package.
We will have some more steps in Zandvoort and then further steps in Monza or Baku. So it is the first part of our planned upgrade, and [we are] very short on parts so we have been careful with it and trying to learn all about it. We are clearly on a big catch-up game, so is it going to make us the quickest car? Unfortunately, not. Does it represent a good step forward from where we were? Yes, I believe it does.”