Vibrations rumored to be cause of Honda engine failures

Fernando Alonso

Unexpected vibrations from the Honda engine are causing McLaren's power unit to effectively shake itself into breaking down, Sky Sports hears.

The McLaren-Honda MCL32 car crawled to a halt on four different occasions over the final two days of pre-season testing at Barcelona with Honda seemingly no closer to fixing an engine which Fernando Alonso described as offering "no power and no reliability" in a withering rebuke of McLaren's power suppliers.

It is understood that vibrations from the Honda engine are suspected to be the root cause of the outages.

"What's the issue with the engine? As far as I can glean, the issue is vibrations and so many vibrations that it is affecting the electrics and things are popping out left, right and center," explained Sky F1's David Croft.

The MCL32 also broke down twice on Thursday with the stoppages also attributed to electrical glitches. But in the wake of two more on-track failures on Friday, Honda acknowledged they were struggling to identify the cause of the breakdowns.

"It was unfortunate that we encountered the electrical issue again despite having replaced the parts under investigation overnight," said Honda F1 chief Yusuke Hasegawa. "This meant a significant amount of today's test was spent trying to identify what was causing the car to lose power."

McLaren themselves stated: "Overnight, the team changed a number of electrical components on both the PU and chassis, but the problem persisted. With every run in the morning session, the team changed further parts in an effort to eliminate as many variables as possible and identify the source." Sky Sports