“We have to deal with mirrors falling off, tail lights falling off, all that kind of stuff.

“But the bigger problem is that the vibrations end up in the driver’s fingers.

“So Fernando [Alonso] He feels he cannot complete more than 25 laps in a row due to the risk of permanent nerve damage to his hands.

“Lance [Stroll] We don’t think we can do more than 15 laps before that threshold.”

The team has been working to find ways to prevent vibrations from the engine that can lead to battery failure in the engine’s hybrid system, which plagued pre-season testing.

These were introduced on Australian GP cars.

Honda F1 manager Koji Watanabe said he would not know whether the measures were effective until cars started running on track on Friday.

The modifications introduced simply stop the vibrations being transmitted to the battery. They are still transmitted to the chassis and from there to the steering.

“This meeting will be meaningless if we are not open and honest about our expectations,” Newey said.

“Until we find the source of the vibration and fix it, we will have to very severely limit the number of laps we can do in the race.”

Alonso said his hands and feet felt “numb” from the vibrations after a number of laps, but added: “If I was fighting for the win, I would have been in the car for three hours, to be clear. But that’s definitely abnormal. That shouldn’t happen.”

“We don’t know what the consequences will be if we continue to drive like that for months on end. So solutions need to be put in place.”

Alonso said the team would decide how to approach the race after practice and qualifying, once they had a better understanding of how the changes to the car had affected the issue.

Honda’s engines have also seen a significant drop in performance as F1 begins a new engine regulation period with a 50/50 split between internal combustion engine (ICE) and electrical components in hybrid engines.

Watanabe declined to comment on information obtained by BBC Sport from an insider that the electrical output of the engine had been reduced by 50kw (67bhp). Electric motors are limited by regulations to 350kw.

However, Watanabe said that Honda was unable to run the power unit at maximum rpm due to reliability issues.

“One of the problems with these regulations is that the shorter you use the ICE power, the more electrical energy you have to use to make up for the lack of ICE power, which means that by the time you really need the electrical energy in the straight, the battery is dead. This becomes a self-fulfilling downward spiral,” Newey said.

“Simple calculations of how ICE power affects lap times are complicated by the effects of the lack of electrical energy.

“Do we believe in the ability of our partners and Honda to increase their power and increase their competitiveness? Absolutely. They have a proven track record and we have full confidence in them.”

Watanabe did not address the question of why Honda is in this situation despite having been in F1 for more than 10 years. Startups Audi and Red Bull Ford have succeeded in producing more efficient engines.

Mr Newey said the car had also reached the desired standard after a “very condensed development period”.

Newey joined Aston Martin in March last year and changed the design philosophy of the team’s cars. They also couldn’t run the model in the new wind tunnel until mid-April.

This means Aston Martin is at least four months behind its rivals in terms of aerodynamic development.

Newey said that in terms of chassis performance, Aston Martin is “a little bit behind the leaders and probably the fifth-best team.”

He said the difference in performance between Aston Martin’s chassis and the best chassis was “about three-quarters of a second, maybe a second”.

He added: “This car has huge development potential. Of course it will take a few races to fully understand its potential.”

“I don’t see any reason inherent in the architecture of the car why we can’t be anywhere close to, if not quite, competitive chassis-wise.”