F1 News: Honda warns no quick fix to Adrian Newey's 'lemon'

(GMM) Honda has warned its Formula 1 struggles with the Aston Martin Lemon, designed by Adrian Newey, will not be solved in Miami, despite intensive recent development work.

As the forced April break comes to an end, Honda F1 engineer Shintaro Orihara said the scale of the problem goes well beyond simple performance.

“The work is going in the right direction and helped us to find the motivation to keep pushing forward,” he said.

“After (Suzuka), we took the opportunity to keep one of the AMR26 cars on site for further static testing in Sakura for the first time, focusing our efforts on reducing the vibrations and thus increasing reliability.”

“We have made some progress, allowing us to implement further countermeasures in Miami and later in the season,” Orihara said.

But while rival teams are bringing major upgrades to Miami, Honda expects only incremental gains.

“Realistically, this progress will not have a visible impact on the power unit performance on track, so we shouldn’t be expecting big jumps forward here,” said the Japanese.