During last weekend’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix Aston Martin Racing’s Lance Stroll set a new record by failing to fight his way out of the first section of F1 knockout qualifying. It marked his 75th career Q1 drop out, officially making him the worst qualifier in modern F1 history. For any driver to survive nine seasons in Formula 1, a remarkable level of talent, luck, and teamwork has to line up in order to support their efforts. Or, in the case of Stroll, a whole buttload of money. Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, Lance’s father, purchased an F1 team and a significant portion of the Aston Martin brand in order to secure his son’s continued position on the grid, and this decade-long multi-billion dollar experiment has seemingly failed in spectacular fashion.
The 26-year-old Canadian driver is paired at Aston Martin with onetime champ 43-year-old Fernando Alonso, with the understanding that Alonso is something of a mentor to his younger teammate. In spite of the elder statesman’s comparatively advanced age, Alonso is absolutely obliterating Stroll when it comes to qualifying skill. Across 51 Grands Prix together Stroll has merely managed to out qualify Alonso eight times head-to-head. They say your teammate is your closest competitor, because you’re driving ostensibly the same car. Stroll has been out qualified by his teammates 130 times to 43 across his career, never managing to have a better qualifying record than any of his full-time teammates.
Put The McLaren Drivers In A Sauber
When asked about his new Q1 exit record on Saturday Stroll defensively dismissed the question, saying “Put the McLaren drivers in the Sauber for 10 years and they will have the most Q1 exits. It’s car-dependent.”
Blaming his misfortunes on the car would make a lot of sense if Stroll weren’t driving a reasonably competitive mid-field car his entire career. Since Fernando Alonso joined Stroll at Aston Martin, the team has finished fifth in the constructors’ title, with Alonso scoring the lion’s share of the team’s points and getting out of Q1 nearly every weekend. In fact, across Alonso’s entire massive 25-season career he’s only been eliminated in Q1 a remarkably low 29 times. Admittedly his career has had higher highs than Strolls, but it’s definitely had lower lows as well. If you can think back to his 2009 season in the recalcitrant Renault, or an abysmal 2014 with Ferrari, and since 2015 he’s been mired in the back half of the grid with a remarkably poor McLaren Honda, then Alpine, then Aston Martin.
Put up or shut up
Stroll’s outburst is deeply unfair to Sauber, as the Swiss team reportedly spends about half what Aston Martin does to run its F1 team. To equate his time in the Williams, Racing Point, and Aston Martin teams over the last decade to be equal to running with Sauber scrubs the fact that all of his teammates found a level of success in those cars that he simply couldn’t, despite the cars being demonstrably faster than anything Sauber has built in the last ten years. It is also unfair to the McLaren driver pairing of Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris, both of whom have talent to which Stroll has proven he could never rise. Neither driver has driven for any team in F1 but McLaren and combined have just 12 Q1 exits.
At some point the driver has to take responsibility for his failings. Nobody has done worse than Stroll in qualifying since he joined the grid, and while he can occasionally make up points during the race with strategy and pounding out laps, it isn’t enough for the Aston Martin team to rise to the station it reliably should be. If Alonso were paired with a safe and reliable pair of hands, I argue the Aston team would be fighting for podiums and perhaps even wins at this point. It is well past time for him to be replaced, but because of who his daddy is, he never will be. Lawrence keeps wasting millions and hamstringing Aston’s development as a team for the sake of his kid’s ego, and that’s a shame.
