Turbulent air from a vehicle in front and a little too much risk led to Lance Stroll’s accident in the final phase of Q1 in qualifying for the 2023 Formula 1 race in Singapore, as the Canadian admits.
The Aston Martin driver took off in the last corner on his decisive lap and crashed spectacularly into the barrier. A front wheel of his AMR23 was even torn off and the Aston Martin was thrown back onto the start-finish straight. Fortunately, Stroll was uninjured.
“I started my lap two seconds behind an Alpine, which wasn’t ideal for the aero performance,” he tries to explain.
Aston Martin driver Stroll was under pressure
At that point, Stroll really needed to improve because he was in last place before his crucial lap. But the first two interim times already indicated that the jump into Q2 would only be possible with one last magic sector – and Stroll tried that.
“I couldn’t improve my lap time enough to get into Q2, so I just threw everything into the last corner and tried to make up some more time,” he says and admits: “That wasn’t really possible.”
“It happens so quickly, but I know why I had the accident, which was because I wasn’t fast enough to get through,” he says.
Poor preparation for the round
Of course, the dirty air in front of him didn’t help either: “Having a car two seconds in front of you is bad for aerodynamics. You just lose a lot of downforce, especially due to the tunnel effect with the walls here,” said Stroll.
But he also struggles with the preparation of his lap because the fact that he was sent to the scales by the FIA messed up his plan a bit. “That put us at the back of the line and I had to try and pass a few people to make it over the line before the session was over,” he explains.
“The outlap was just pretty bad. I had a lot of traffic in front of me and everyone was trying to get over the line.” So he also found himself in the unfavorable starting position, which ultimately led to the accident.
No worries after departure
The fact that he was ultimately thrown back onto the start-finish straight, where Lando Norris almost caught him, didn’t worry him – even though he was in the middle of the straight and many drivers still wanted to finish their laps. But because he assumed the red flag would come out anyway, he didn’t worry.
“I just checked to see if everything was okay with me and when I realized that I was okay, it just felt like shit because we had a difficult session and things have been a bit difficult in general lately,” argues he.
Stroll has missed Q3 five times in the last six qualifying sessions and is now in last place on the grid for the second time in a row, while teammate Fernando Alonso remains the only driver to have finished in Q3 in every single qualifying session this season. He is now 2:13 behind in the qualifying duel against the Spaniard.
“Qualifying didn’t go according to plan at all: bad overtaking maneuvers, traffic, bad tire management,” he says angrily. “If these things accumulate here, it’s a negative spiral. The result was the accident.”