MPH: Laughing at Aston's F1 troubles? That's a low-intelligence take

Obviously, things aren’t going great for Aston Martin F1 right now and the AMR26 is expected to endure a totally uncompetitive debut this weekend. But it’s a freeze-frame moment in a story which could eventually play out wonderfully. Ensuring that it does so requires calm resolve right when it would be very understandable for owner Lawrence Stroll to lose patience.

If we look at the current freeze-frame picture, it is one of a car totally out of phase with the others in its conception and development – started way later than the others. This at a time of a radical rules re-set which has caught power unit partner Honda on the hop, together with possibly Adrian Newey’s most ambitious design in a long career of ambitious designs and a factory feeling the growing pains of recent huge expansion. These have all fed into one very tight knot of acute problems for the car. How long it takes to untie that knot can’t be accurately predicted but it would be foolish to dismiss the potential.

That super-fast expansion of the last few years is a marker of the ambition Stroll has injected into the project. Transforming the tiny Force India outfit into a super-team with the best of everything in just a few years tells of his determination to make a success, to create something very special.

So the facilities at its Silverstone base are at the very cutting edge, its wind tunnel in particular. The staffing level has quadrupled in five years. World champion drivers have been hired, high profile technical staff poached from world champion teams until now the highest profile of them all, Adrian Newey, has been put in charge of the whole project. And after all that investment and ambition, here they are very likely to be running at the tail of the field this weekend – and probably not even for more than a few laps.

Unfortunately, it’s easy for such ambition to be mocked, especially when it’s from someone who came into the sport from success elsewhere. There’s an equally unfortunate tendency to delight in the failure of someone’s grandiose plan. It’s a low-intelligence take.

Here’s where the project is at. The Honda’s battery is being damaged by excessive and unforeseen vibrations when installed in the car, to the point where it becomes ‘unsafe to drive’ (in the words of Honda’s racing department head Ikuo Takeish). Aston Martin’s first attempt at making its own gearbox (as opposed to taking that supplied by Mercedes) has brought with it reliability and shift quality problems. The power unit cannot effectively harvest at 250kW (the lower of the two regulation limits expected to be used through the season, the other being 350kW). Though whether this is just a function of the battery issue hasn’t been definitively nailed down yet. The power unit – conceived to run at a high operating temperature so as to minimise the required radiator sizes – is running excessive temperatures which appear to have demanded aerodynamically costly levels of bodywork ducting, thereby more than losing the benefit of the smaller radiators.

Newey’s no-compromise approach to the car’s concept combined with a truncated development period obviously carried risk – and some of that downside risk has duly played out and fed upon itself. Because Newey only joined part-way through last year, the AMR26 project started late and one of the corollaries of that was him requesting Honda at late notice to shorten the length of the power unit assembly so as to maximise the volumes around the rear of the floor used in the creation of downforce. That audacious rear suspension layout – feeding the upper wishbones high-up into the structure which is also carrying the rear wing pylons – was part of the same concept.