Aston Martin “much less negative than the media” amid battery disaster

Fernando Alonso says he is “disappointed” with Honda’s battery stock limitations, but admits Aston Martin is “much less negative than the media” about its issues.

The Australian Grand Prix weekend has so far seen no end to Aston Martin’s ongoing power unit issues, following a troubled winter with the AMR26.

Extreme vibrations from the battery have severely limited running for Aston Martin, with Fernando Alonso completing no laps in FP1 at Albert Park before having a smoother FP2.

Team boss Adrian Newey admitted on Friday that Aston is down to its final two battery units for its cars, with no spares available from Honda.

Hoping for more running in FP3, Crash.net asked Alonso if that would be possible, he replied: “I don’t know. I just drive the car. It’s more a question for Honda.

“As I say, I drive the car. Obviously, I feel disappointed to don’t have stock, [with Honda] only supplying one team. But yeah, this is the situation. So, that is a question for them.”

Alonso backed Honda on Thursday to eventually win a world championship with Aston Martin, while adding on Friday that the outfit is not as “negative” about the challenge it faces as is being reported.

“We are much less negative than the media and people around,” he told Sky Sports F1.

“It’s nice to tell the story when someone is doing great and when someone is doing something wrong, when things are not going well.

“You try to exaggerate both ends. And we know where we are.

“As I said yesterday, we have a big challenge ahead of us, but everyone in the team is embracing the challenge in any way we can to get out of this situation.”

Alonso ‘doesn’t understand’ where set-up window is yet with AMR26

Alonso’s interrupted running on Friday in Australia means he wasn’t able to carry out much set-up work.

“Yeah, not much learning,” he said.

“Unfortunately, the Honda issue in FP1 and some Honda issues in FP2 a little bit limited our number of laps today and that was not needed again because we needed to recover a bit in order to understand the car as well and the window of where this car operates.

“Obviously, we brought a completely new package into this race and we need to understand where to run that package in terms of set-up.

“We didn’t manage too many laps today, so hopefully a cleaner FP3 tomorrow.”