Four and a half seconds would be insane. Could they fall foul of the 107% rule, assuming that this would indeed be the case?
Not likely. They would most likely need to be about 5-6 seconds off the pace for that. But even were that to happen, I think FIA would ignore it. Sponsors would be livid otherwise.
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Well, the budget cap doesn’t really let them. Although I was thinking more about general F1 sponsors and not the team’s sponsors. It would be a bad look for the sport if some cars were excluded from running due to the 107% rule, so I assume they would just handwave it were it ever to come up.
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The last time a car was excluded due to failing to comply with the 107% rule was in 2012. They’ve already waived it tons of times since then, most recently for Sargent and De Vries (2023) and Stroll (2021).
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Well, yes, but the original purpose came from a very different era in the 90s, where you had really poor pay drivers and also teams that pretty much were only interested in showing up to the race to be seen for sponsorship purposes and were never even intending to actually race. It was intended to keep unserious cars out, and I would be highly surprised if they barred Aston from racing in Australia even were they 5 seconds off the pace.
The two takeaways thus far seem to be: Red Bull will be winning by large margins again and Aston are astronomically shit.
I feel sorry for Alonso. Think he will make it to the end of the year?
I thought it’s the same engine as in Red Bull… Kind of lost track how it got rebranded in the last years.
Red Bull is using RBPT which are built by old former Honda engineers, meanwhile AM is using Honda which are built by new Honda engineers.
