The consequences are twofold, as Newey explained on Friday. On the engine side, Honda needs to focus on a significant performance deficit with the internal combustion engine, but that is not yet possible because vibrations – and therefore reliability issues – overshadow everything.

“I think there’s a very clear action on Honda to try to reduce the vibration,” Newey said in the FIA press conference. “They are working on that. It’s not going to be a quick fix because it involves fundamental balancing and damping projects that they will need to conduct. I can’t comment how quickly they can achieve that but that has to be the main drive.

They’re developmentally so far behind. The vibration issue is sapping all their resources for what could be going into adding more performance, and the fact they can’t even give a timeline must mean it could be many weeks or even months before it’s sorted. And in all that time, they’re getting no valuable data on their chassis.

Screams in Alonso Fernando