Aston Martin reveal fears over nerve damage will prevent F1 team from finishing Australian GP
Aston Martin have admitted that Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll will not be able to complete even half the race at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix this weekend for fear of suffering permanent nerve damage because of a vibration problem with their car,The team principal Adrian Newey, who also designed the team’s new car, revealed on Thursday in the Melbourne paddock that both drivers were suffering such severe vibration through the steering wheel that they would only be able to complete 25 and 15 laps respectively,“That vibration into the chassis is causing a few reliability problems, mirrors falling off, tail lights falling off, all that sort of thing, which we are having to address,” he said,“But the much more significant problem with that, is that vibration is transmitted ultimately into the driver’s fingers,Fernando is of the feeling that he can’t do more than 25 laps consecutively before he will risk permanent nerve damage into his hands.
Lance [who has had several wrist injuries] is of the opinion that he can’t do more than 15 laps before that threshold.”The vibration is being caused in the engine and then amplified across the chassis of the car and while engine manufacturer Honda has attempted to employ “counter-measures”, they do not solve the problem.Alonso, who was publicly dismissive when he endured an underperforming Honda engine at McLaren between 2015 and 2017, also shared his concerns.“The vibrations coming from the engine are hurting a little bit the components in the car and as drivers we feel them,” he said.“We feel our body with this frequency of the vibrations that you feel after 20 or 25 minutes a little bit numb.
“It shouldn’t be there and we don’t know the consequences either if you keep driving like that for months.So a solution has to be implemented.”The striking revelation is a hammer blow to Aston Martin, who had already been struggling in pre-season testing.The car was not ready to run for the full three days in Barcelona and at the two subsequent tests in Bahrain their running was severely curtailed with reliability problems centred on the Honda engine.It now appears the drivers could not physically drive the car for a full stint because of the vibration.
Speaking for the first time publicly this season, Newey broke the news in the team’s hospitality, where he was joined by Koji Watanabe, president of Honda racing.Honda are returning to the sport as an engine manufacturer this season but at their engine launch earlier this year had conceded that they had not achieved the targets they had hoped for, with testing suggesting the engine was underpowered and unreliable.Surprisingly Newey also admitted he had not yet even fully discussed the issue of the vibration with Watanabe.“There’s no point in [not] being open and honest in this meeting, of our expectations,” said Newey.“It’s something that unfortunately Koji and I haven’t had a chance to discuss properly prior to this meeting, but we are going to have to be very restricted on how many laps we do in the race, until we get on top of the source of the vibration.
”Watanabe could not give a timeline of when they issue would be fixed but with the Chinese GP following in a week, it seems unlikely Aston Martin will be able to complete that race either.“We are working together as one team and further measures are already under consideration,” he said.“But we are not able to share that technical detail, so we ask for your patience as we continue working toward unlocking full performance potential.”The revelation comes in the year Aston Martin had been hoping to make the step up to join the front runners on the grid.Under the ownership of the billionaire Lawrence Stroll, the father of Lance Stroll, there has been a huge investment in the team.
They have built a brand new factory and wind tunnel facility at Silverstone and brought Newey on board from Red Bull, a huge coup as he is recognised as the pre-eminent designer of the modern F1 era,He has won titles with three different teams, Williams, McLaren and Red Bull and was made team principal of Aston Martin at the end of last year,This is the most serious issue any of Newey’s cars have encountered but he remained optimistic the issue would be resolved and that the car had potential,Nonetheless there was also a suggestion that there had been no little disconnect between Honda and Aston Martin,“The positive out of this is that our relationship has strengthened the relationship between Honda and AMR, we are working very much as a partnership now,” he said.
“That’s good, clearly, and I think we are able to help each other.”
Union tries to seize control of works council at Tesla’s German factory
Europe’s largest trade union is trying to gain control of the works council at Elon Musk’s Tesla gigafactory near Berlin, in an industrial relations showdown marked by lawsuits and mutual accusations of slander.The works council, an elected body of employees that negotiates everything from working hours to pay deals with a company’s management, is considered an entrenched aspect of the German corporate world, particularly in the car industry.But it was a bone of contention at the Tesla plant in Grünheide, about 20 miles (30km) south-east of Berlin, even before the gates opened almost four years ago.There have been regular clashes at the plant – which employs about 10,000 workers and is the US electric carmaker’s only production site in Europe – between the turbo-capitalist approach of Tesla’s management and Germany’s tradition of a social market economy, which relies on worker representation and collective bargaining.Voting in elections to the works council, which is now controlled by non-trade union members, began on Monday and will close on Wednesday
Europe’s next-generation fighter jet project may collapse if row continues, says warplane maker
France and Germany’s next-generation fighter jet project could soon be “dead”, one of the two companies tasked with delivering it has warned, amid a worsening corporate rift over who gets to build the aircraft.Dassault Aviation, France’s leading warplane maker, said Airbus’s defence arm – which represents Germany and Spain – needed to cooperate on the €100bn programme otherwise it would collapse.“Airbus doesn’t want to work with Dassault, full stop. I take note. I never said I didn’t want to work with Airbus or with the Germans,” said Éric Trappier, Dassault’s chief executive, via an interpreter while presenting the company’s financial results on Wednesday
Google faces lawsuit after Gemini chatbot allegedly instructed man to kill himself
Last August, Jonathan Gavalas became entirely consumed with his Google Gemini chatbot. The 36-year-old Florida resident had started casually using the artificial intelligence tool earlier that month to help with writing and shopping. Then Google introduced its Gemini Live AI assistant, which included voice-based chats that had the capability to detect people’s emotions and respond in a more human-like way.“Holy shit, this is kind of creepy,” Gavalas told the chatbot the night the feature debuted, according to court documents. “You’re way too real
X to ban users from earning revenue if they post unlabelled AI-generated war videos
Elon Musk’s X will ban users from making money on the platform if they repeatedly post unlabelled AI-generated war videos, after social media feeds were flooded with fake battle scenes from the Iran conflict.The social media platform, which has about half a billion monthly active users, will suspend people from earning revenue from posts for 90 days if they put up AI-generated videos of an armed conflict without adding a disclosure that it was made with AI. A second infraction wouldlead to a permanent ban, it said on Tuesday night, after the first days of the conflict in Iran were marked by a torrent of bogus online footage.Timelines on X, as well as Instagram and Facebook, which are run by Meta, have carried numerous faked battle scenes, including Iranian rockets pursuing and shooting down a US jet – which was viewed 70m times, according to checks by BBC Verify – and another clip that used AI to replace smoke rising from the site of a real missile strike with a fake fireball several times bigger.Users can make hundreds of dollars a month on X as part of the platform’s advertising model if they build substantial followings approaching 100,000 people, which incentivises the production of shocking viral posts
Nvidia and UK Wealth Fund invest in British autonomous driving startup Oxa
Nvidia is investing in the British autonomous driving startup Oxa, alongside backing from the UK’s National Wealth Fund, in a boost to the country’s technology sector.The Oxford-based company, which has developed software for self-driving industrial vehicles, said it had raised $103m (£77m) from investors to focus on commercial solutions for that software, as well as its physical AI and robotics technology, and to push on with its global expansion plans.The fundraising includes $50m from the National Wealth Fund, owned by the Treasury, and backing from the US tech company Nvidia’s venture capital arm, NVentures.Founded in 2014, Oxa now focuses on the automation of repetitive industrial driving tasks, such as the towing and carrying of goods in ports, airports and factories.The latest investor round also includes capital from existing shareholders the London-listed IP Group, which invests in British tech companies, the Australian superannuation (pension) fund Hostplus and BP Ventures, the UK oil company’s arm that backs innovative technologies
What was really behind Jack Dorsey laying off nearly half of Block’s staff?
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