Aston are getting the new wind tunnel and poached a lot of talent. Plus the ~~GP2~~ Honda engine. They might sink, they might swim, but the trajectory after this year may not be so clear cut.

Do they wanna prevent spam? Use SimpleLogin/addy and never give out their actual email. Google knowing it is probably not mean more spam, but you could still filter out emails to the base email address.

Wanna prevent hacking attempts? Enable 2FA, and again, Google knowing probably doesn’t increase the attack surface area too much.

There are a bunch of reasons why you’d want to hide an email account, but the remediations are all very different depending on that reason. At the end of the scale you’d probably never wanna use the app at all, and just login via browser (not chrome), but even then is Google key logging Android? Who knows.

So you’re right, it’s not important why they want to do it, it’s crucial if they actually want to be helped properly.