Alarming admission after Alonso retirement; under-pressure veteran claims unwanted record: Pit Talk

As teams had back to Europe to digest the first fortnight of racing, Fernando Alonso might favour some massage therapy.

Alonso hasn’t crashed this year, but just act of driving the Aston Martin is doing him damage, with the Spaniard forced out of the weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix with numb limbs.

The weekend off will be much needed to ensure he’s fighting fit for Honda’s home race in Japan.

Williams will need more than a massage to score points in Suzuka, with Carlos Sainz calling on his team to lift after a difficult opening phase of the campaign.

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And Esteban Ocon knows he has work to do to get his year on track after claiming an unfancied record in Shanghai.

SHOCKING ALONSO FOOTAGE EMERGES AFTER VIBRATIONS FORCE DNF

Fernando Alonso was losing feeling in his hands and feet when he retired from the Chinese Grand Prix after 32 laps due to extreme car vibrations caused by Aston Martin’s Honda engine.

The retirement came a little over a week after team boss Adrian Newey said his drivers would struggle to complete more than a few dozen laps because of the risk of permanent nerve damage due to the vibrations.

The shaking is emanating from Honda’s underpowered and unreliable 2026 engine, which has become the first-order problem in Aston Martin’s woeful start to the season.

The engine was vibrating so severely during testing that it caused itself several battery failures that heavily curtailed running and left both drivers with just one battery pack apiece for the opening two rounds of the season.

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Honda put in place countermeasures to shield the battery from the shaking, but those fixes did not prevent vibrations being amplified through the cockpit.

Though Alonso played down the risk of nerve damage in Australia, he admitted after getting out of the car in China that the vibrations were too severe to continue long past half distance.

“I could not probably finish the race anyway,” he said, per ESPN. “The vibration level was very high today.

“At one point, from lap 20 to 33, I was struggling a little bit to feel my hands and my feet.

“We were one lap behind, we were last. It was probably no point to keep on going.”

Alarming on-board footage showed Alonso taking his hands off the wheel down the straight in an apparent bid to get feeling back in his fingers.

“It was worse today than any other session in the weekend, to be honest. For whatever reason, I don’t know.

“Some of the steps we did [to help the engine] were achieved artificially — I mean, just lowering the RPM of the engine and things like that, so everything vibrates less.

“But in the race, obviously, you still need to go high in some of the RPM when you make an overtake move or when you have to recharge or something like that. Over time it’s more difficult. It’s more demanding.”

Lance Stroll also retired from the race, but because his battery failed after nine laps, forcing him to park his car by the side of the road.

Chief trackside officer Mike Krack — who was representing the team in Shanghai while Newey remained in the UK — said that there were positives to take from the team’s double retirement.

“We’ve done 33 laps [with Alonso], which we have never done in a row, so I think it’s a new learning,” he said.

“We have not had any other issues related to [the vibrations] other than the driver stopping the race. We have not had bits falling off or anything like that, which can happen as well.”

SAINZ CALLS FOR WILLIAMS TO LIFT AFTER SCRAPING FIRST POINTS

After another weekend confirming its car is nowhere near the level of competitiveness it expected, Williams personnel returned to their UK factory to see a banner at the front gate featuring its weekend results, including Alex Albon’s failure to start, under the words ‘Let’s keep building’.

You can’t say the team isn’t owning up to its 2026 struggles.

Carlos Sainz at least spared the team some blushes, with his P9 finish — the team’s first score of the season — balancing out the hydraulic issue that prevented Albon from taking part in the Chinese Grand Prix.

But even Sainz revelled little in the result, calling on the team to redouble its efforts to turn the year around.

“We know we are too slow compared to where we wanted to be, where we expected to be,” Sainz said, per RacingNews365.

“Part of that is weight that we know we need to get out of the car, but another part, a very big part of it, is downforce that we need to improve.

“We haven’t [had] the most reliable car. Alex not starting the race and me missing so many free practices and having so many issues.

“Honestly, we need to level up, because we’re having too many issues in too many areas.

“As team, we need to dig deep.”

Over two rounds the team has been the ninth fastest on average, ahead of only the beleaguered Aston Martin and newcomer Cadillac. It’s 2.6 seconds off the fastest car and almost 0.8 seconds off the back of the midfield.

Speculation suggests Williams is almost 30 kilograms overweight, which team boss James Vowles thinks will take until at least May to take out of the car.

Rough estimates are that 30 kilos would be worth around 0.9 seconds in lap time, meaning the rest of the deficit is in the car’s general performance.

UNDER-PRESSURE OCON CLAIMS UNWANTED RECORD

Esteban Ocon took custody of an unwanted record at the weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix, having now entered the most grands prix without a pole position in Formula 1 history.

Ocon, who made is F1 debut in 2016, entered his 182nd grand prix in Shanghai, eclipsing fellow Frenchman Romain Grosjean’s previous benchmark for 181 races without a P1 start.

Compatriot and contemporary Pierre Gasly is third on the list, with 180 starts without a pole position.

Martin Brundle and Johnny Herbet previously jointly held the record after their 165th starts.

Ocon has never started a race higher than third. Grosjean and Gasly both have front-row starts.

The statistic is somewhat skewed against Ocon given the number of races per year in F1’s modern era, and despite having one a grand prix, the Frenchman has never had access to frontrunning machinery.

Ocon’s record-breaking weekend was one to forget, with he 29-year-old eclipsed by younger teammate Oliver Bearman throughout and failing to score points.

Bearman qualified inside the top 10 for both the sprint and the grand prix, with Ocon three places behind him on both occasions.

Whereas Bearman finished a strong fifth on Sunday as the best of the midfielders, Ocon was forced to serve a penalty for crashing into Franco Colapinto, which let him 14th among 15 finishers and a lap down on winner Andrea Kimi Antonelli.

“It’s my fault,” he admitted after the race. “I did a mistake, I misjudged it.

“I’m glad that Franco still got a point because he drove a very good race.”

Ocon is under pressure to retain his seat this year, with team principal Ayao Komatsu admitting he expected more from the experienced Frenchman last year, when he was overpowered by Bearman in his rookie campaign.

Australian Jack Doohan is the team’s reserve driver, having jumped ship from Alpine at the start of the year following his premature axing by the French-owned team early last season.