Lance Stroll’s poor performance in Formula 1 this year has cost the Aston Martin team valuable points and a lot of money. After seven seasons behind the wheel of a single-seater, the driver from Quebec is one of the worst in his class.
Stroll landed at Williams at the start of the 2017 season at the age of 18 and has since collected 268 points in 143 races on the big Formula 1 circuit – fewer than Leclerc, Norris, Ocon, Gasly and Co. in his age group.
According to a compilation by the Journal, this puts him in sixth place among the nine drivers in his cohort who made the jump to the premier discipline and have stayed there for more than one season since then.
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Last weekend, the small point he earned by finishing tenth at the Abu Dhabi GP did not allow him to surpass his “best” collection of 75 points achieved in 2020 aboard his Racing Point car.
To forget… again!
At the end of the 21-race calendar, in which he was excluded from the points award nine times, his points total was 74 points. This season, in which he finished 10th in the Drivers’ Championship, was marked by injuries, a crisis in Qatar and an erratic car mid-race and should be forgotten again.
Especially because his teammate Fernando Alonso, behind the wheel of an identical car, overtook him by 132 points and finished fourth, behind champion Max Verstappen, his Red Bull teammate Sergio Pérez and seven-time Mercedes world champion Lewis Hamilton.
Awkward?
Surely. Because this gap to his teammates is a revealing indication. Stroll achieved just three top-five finishes in this championship, while Alonso finished on the podium eight times and secured 73.6% of Aston Martin’s points.
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For the sixth time in his F1 career, the driver was beaten by his teammate. The only time it outperformed the other car in the same colors was in the 2018 championship, when Sergey Sirotkin also drove Williams’ real tractor to the bottom of the standings.
This year Aston Martin had big goals and ambitions to build a car that could compete with competitors like Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes.
And while the Best of the Rest title was possible for the British team, majority owned by Lawrence Stroll, it was beaten to the finish line by McLaren. This fourth place among manufacturers is worth its weight in gold, especially in the sponsorship area.
But Papa Stroll remains adamant and insists the team’s financial health is in good shape. So much so that in mid-November he sold a minority stake to a private investment firm, Arctos, for the princely sum of $1.2 billion.
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Behind Ocon, Gasly and Co.
In the fastest and most promising car he has driven since joining Formula 1, Lance Stroll was unable to assert himself and maintain the pace. Two good performances at the end of the season make us not forget his weaknesses in both qualifying and the race. Even test driver Felipe Drugovich was faster than him twice in free practice, including last week in Abu Dhabi.
Despite his poor performances, team boss Mike Krack has already confirmed that he will be there again next year.
Does he deserve to be guaranteed a spot because Dad owns a stable? Many other drivers lost their places despite better results.
In his cohort, Stroll collected 2.5 times fewer points than Lando Norris, who joined McLaren in 2019. And yet in these four seasons the Canadian driver was behind the wheel of competitive cars from Racing Point and Aston Martin.
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Britain’s George Russell has 469 career points. He may drive the shiny Mercedes, but he has made a living displacing the Williams for three years, moving him from 10th to 8th in 2021. The same goes for Charles Leclerc, who moved to Ferrari, another leading team in the top three, after pushing the limits of his Sauber in 2018.
As Jacques Villeneuve, the uncle, so aptly said in the Journal during the Las Vegas Grand Prix: “If you don’t have the skills, you’re in trouble.”
The fact is that Stroll had a good “bazou” in his hand, which he was not able to push to the limit like his competitors. We can therefore ask ourselves whether the fire still burns for the Canadian pilot, whose steering wheel is not in danger.
Full throttle
To evaluate his performance we have to compare him more with Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon. Gasly performed small miracles for Toro Rosso and AlphaTauri, riding in the middle of the pack and pulling a few rabbits out of the hat, before moving to Alpine this year.
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After losing his steering wheel at Force India, which became Racing Point in 2019, notably at the hands of Stroll, whose father took over the team, Ocon found one at Renault and Alpine, where he made progress every season. This means he has been able to collect a total of 422 points since 2017, 154 points more than the Quebecer. However, with one less season.
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The Frenchman has been the author of three podiums in his career, including one in Monaco last May. He achieved the best score of his career and finished 8th in the championship last year.
He contributed to the success of Renault and Alpine.
The same cannot be said of his colleague at Aston Martin.
