Fernando Alonso left almost speechless as his steering wheel comes off in his hand.

As if Aston Martin wasn't having enough problems, the team suffered a bizarre moment during Friday's second practice session.

"There's a problem with the steering wheel, it's switching off," reported Alonso, who had sat out the opening session as Felipe Drugovich took to the track.

Moments later, the onboard camera showed what appeared to be the steering wheel come off in the Spaniard's hands.

"Yeah, the car was not working," he subsequently told reporters, "and I could not shift gears at one point, so yeah, I had the dash off. So, I could not communicate with the team either, and yeah, in the last corner the wheel was off.

"So yeah, we realised that maybe the steering column of the wheel or something had a problem. The mechanics quickly changed the parts and everything was fine."

Not that fine, for the two-time world champion ended the day 15th, with his teammate 19th.

"We had a steering wheel issue on Fernando's car which we are looking to resolve in the garage," explained a team spokesperson at the time of the issue. "Upon further investigation, we're changing parts of the steering system on Fernando's car."

While the errant steering wheel may have been fixed, Alonso is expecting a tough weekend.

"Yeah, I think it's going to be a tough, unfortunately, we seem not to have the pace before coming here. The characteristics of Bahrain was a little bit of a concern for us, for our package, and yeah, probably we confirm today that we are not competitive. It's going to be a tough weekend, but we will try to learn.

"We will try to push, and we are not giving up," he insisted.

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