How secure is Lance Stroll still in the saddle at Aston Martin? The Canadian is well behind his experienced teammate Fernando Alonso and has collected 80 points less than the Spaniard. Unsurprisingly, there are those who see his place at Aston Martin as shaky, even though he is the son of team owner Lawrence Stroll.
“I believe that if Lance Stroll continues like this, then at some point the father will not be able to avoid having to think about the second personality,” explains expert Ralf Schumacher in a Formel1.de interview.
Stroll himself knows that the 37 points he has collected in eight races are not up to the mark given the performance of the AMR23: “I definitely have to work on a few things and get better,” he admits.
However, Stroll also says that a few things didn’t go for him this season. For example, there was his pre-season bike accident in which he broke his hand, which handicapped him in the first races of the season. He also lacked the experience of the pre-season tests in Bahrain.
“It’s definitely not ideal to race with broken bones,” he says. It bothered him a lot, especially in Bahrain, “but then it got better and better. In Melbourne, the pain was still ten to 15 percent, but it was bearable. And then it was good.”
Bad streak due to circumstances
So that’s no excuse for Stroll, especially since he had shown a reasonably good performance in the first three races of the season and always made it into Q3. It was only from Baku that the earnings crisis began for him.
There, in ninth place, he achieved his worst qualifying result up to that point, but he would have wished for a result like this at the upcoming events, because he only reached Q3 once in the following four races – in Barcelona. That was also the only race in which he was able to beat teammate Alonso.
But that was always due to special circumstances. His exit from Miami in Q1 came as Aston Martin tried to get into Q2 on just one set of tyres. “He (Alonso; editor’s note) did the same and while he went up a tenth, I lost a tenth.”
In Monaco, he puts his retirement in Q2 down to damage to the underbody, “and then you can’t catch up in Monaco,” he quarrels. And Canada was also a difficult qualifying session due to the rain. “So there were reasons why it wasn’t going well,” says Stroll.
Stroll: Alonso “best teammate”
But he notes that Alonso, unlike him, got everything out of the car: “In terms of pure pace, he was better than me. He drives incredibly well,” admits Stroll and calls the two-time world champion the “best teammate I have ever had”.
“And he’s been doing it his entire career,” he adds. “He just gets the best out of every car he gets into. And even if he didn’t have a winning car, he won with it. And he’s showing that again this season. He just pushes the car to the limit and comes in handy in every race behind Max [Verstappen] to the goal. That’s very impressive.”
Stroll has to admit that while he was having one of his best days himself, Alonso was just that little bit quicker. “And I’m really motivated to step on the gas and get to this level.”
“I’m focused on the things I need to work on and this weekend is another opportunity to do that.”