Aston Martin yet to find cause of brake issues

Finley Crebolder
Sebastian Vettel, Aston Martin

Aston Martin have yet to discover what caused the brakes on both of their cars to drastically overheat at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.

Disaster struck for the team at Imola where, on their way to the grid before the start of the race, the brakes on the cars of both Lance Stroll and Sebastian Vettel overheated and caught fire.

This forced the team to carry out some last-minute repairs, with them failing to complete the work on Vettel’s car in time, causing him to start from the pit-lane.

After the race, Otmar Szafnauer revealed the reason for the problems was still being looked into.

“Both our cars suffered brake overheating problems on the way to the grid and we are currently investigating the root cause in order to implement a permanent solution,” he said.

“I was just in the debrief and we still don’t know [what caused it]. We’ll get all the data for the laps to the grid.

“What happened was that we overheated the rear brakes and the laps to the grid weren’t at the normal pace we usually go, so we didn’t get the airflow.

“But we’re aware of that and even with that, the settings are such that they shouldn’t have caught fire. We overheated them but we don’t know why or how.”

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It was not the only mechanical issue the team suffered at Imola with Stroll and Vettel also both encountering gearbox problems.

“I had some very strange upshifts throughout the race so I was a little bit concerned,” said Stroll.

“It was costing us a lot of lap time and it kept reoccurring every few laps, and it was just hurting me pretty badly out there.”

That is another problem the team have yet to get to the bottom of.

“It seems like every time we passed the start-finish line we lost the synchronisation of the gearbox. So there’s some clues, but we still don’t know why [it happened],” Szafnauer added.

Despite all of the problems, Stroll managed to cross the line in P7 although he was ultimately classified as P8 after being given a penalty for an illegal overtake on Pierre Gasly.

Vettel, on the other hand, did not finish, being forced to retire with a handful of laps left.

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