The Qatar Grand Prix saw Lance Stroll’s building frustration come to a head as Aston Martin’s encouraging 2023 Formula 1 season continued to unravel – but did the most recent race weekend further exemplify that the team’s potential will most be capped by its struggling driver’s presence?
Aston Martin began the latest campaign as the revitalised force in F1. With a massively revised car and the addition of two-time World Champion Fernando Alonso, things were looking rosy as the team swiftly established itself as the closest competitor to the runaway Red Bulls at the front.
After successive placings of seventh in the Constructors’ Championship since morphing into Aston Martin back in 2021, the British marque appeared to finally be delivering on the promise it had consistently talked up but failed to showcase on a consistent basis.
But since Alonso climbed atop the rostrum in Montreal for the sixth time in only eight rounds, he has only added a solitary top-three finish across the previous nine races.
Consequently, the Spaniard has surrendered third place in the standings to ex-McLaren nemesis Lewis Hamilton, while Aston Martin have rapidly slipped behind both Mercedes and Ferrari in the teams’ championship.
Aston Martin Team Principal Mike Krack has attributed its sudden regression to unexpected “side effects” from the raft of upgrades the side bolted onto the AMR23 in Canada. Despite the entire operation undertaking “crazy hours” to recover the lost ground, Aston Martin has thus far been unable to rediscover its early-season momentum, dropping into the clutches of a resurgent McLaren side on the track.
The 2023 season has been a tale of two halves for Aston Martin and McLaren. The Woking camp entered the year braced to be on the back foot after missing development targets with its MCL60 car, but an upgraded car in Austria has transcended the team into a consistent fixture at the sharp end.
Despite starting out of position due to deleted lap times for exceeding track limits in qualifying, Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris recovered a cumulative 11 places in Sunday’s Qatar GP to ensure McLaren scored consecutive double podiums for the first time in over a decade. Add Piastri’s Sprint victory from Saturday to the mix and McLaren outscored Aston Martin handsomely again at the Lusail circuit.
Heading into the weekend, Alonso reluctantly said Aston Martin would have to “accept” that McLaren would usurp them.
It now appears a formality it will happen as early as the next round in Austin, United States based on the rate McLaren have slashed the deficit in recent weeks. Having been a resounding 137 points ahead of its Mercedes-powered counterpart after the British Grand Prix in July, Aston Martin now only reside 11 points clear of McLaren with five rounds remaining this season.
Alonso’s costly trip through the gravel, dropping him behind Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc to sixth, didn’t aid Aston Martin’s cause last Sunday – but he has been the least of the team’s problems. Amid Aston Martin’s plight down the pecking order, the Oviedo-born racer has been as dogged as ever, continuously extracting every last ounce of performance out of the car beneath him.
After Carlos Sainz’s early exit last weekend, Alonso remains the only driver to have progressed to Q3 in every qualifying and has scored points in all 17 rounds bar one. That relentless consistency synonymous with the unabating Spaniard has enabled him to retain fourth place, ahead of both Ferrari drivers and Mercedes’ George Russell.
Contrastingly, though, Stroll lies a colossal 136 points adrift of his team-mate and even on the brink of being displaced from the top 10 by the two Alpine drivers directly behind.
Stroll was eliminated from the first segment of qualifying for the fourth time in succession in Qatar, resulting in a meltdown that saw him throw his steering wheel away, shove trainer Henry Howe and then deliver a curt seven-word interview including a four-letter expletive. Those actions, which landed him a warning from the FIA, show his wretched run has begun to take its toll.
The unique situation of having his father outright own the team means Stroll’s seat is under virtually no pressure. However, this season has exposed the conundrum facing Lawrence Stroll in prioritising whether he is purely involved in F1 to see his son succeed or to see the Aston Martin brand thrive.
A cloned Alonso would currently have Aston Martin second in the Constructors’ Championship, with an extremely comfortable 40-point buffer to Mercedes. Of course, that is a simplistic view to take and there aren’t many drivers who could stack up to Alonso’s elite level. Nevertheless, the huge disparity between Aston Martin’s two competitors is among the biggest on the grid – and is a glaring weakness that rival teams have been able to gracefully capitalise on.
To be fair, Stroll can count himself somewhat unfortunate. The 24-year-old missed the entirety of pre-season testing after a cycling accident had left him with two broken wrists. That meant he was still finding his feet when Aston Martin’s 2023 charger was operating at its best and a run of bad results as the car’s competitiveness tailed away led to his confidence plummeting to rock bottom.
The Canadian has also occasionally been unlucky with circumstances aligning against him in races and small margins adding up to exaggerate his overall deficit to Alonso.
For example, Stroll only clocked a time at Suzuka a few tenths shy of Alonso. But while the former exited in Q1, the latter advanced through to Q3 and then bagged points. Aside from Red Bull and Verstappen cantering away, the field spread being so compact this year means disaster has never been too far off, especially for an individual like Stroll who has never been an exceptional qualifier.
However, moments like Japan have been the exception rather than the rule between the two. Far too often Stroll has languished miles behind Alonso on the timing sheets, most recently in Qatar when he wound up over nine-tenths shy of his illustrious partner in both the weekend’s qualifying sessions.
The ex-Williams racer has also been responsible for several avoidable errors, most recently exceeding track limits too frequently during the Qatar GP, dropping him from ninth to outside the points in 11th.
“I’m just struggling with the car and just getting to grips with the balance,” Stroll explained last weekend. “I’m just not able to extract performance from it right now, which is just difficult and frustrating. There’s high levels of understeer, snap oversteer, [and] a lack of grip.
“I feel like I can’t really lean on the car and drive it with confidence without dealing with snaps and understeer and just a balance that I really don’t particularly enjoy driving.”
Stroll claims the last time he felt comfortable inside the AMR23 was in Austria. Incidentally, that was the last time he edged Alonso in a competitive session. But his assertion does uphold an element of truth.
Alonso has arguably the largest operating window of any F1 driver in history. He inherently prefers understeer but is capable of conquering any behavioural challenges a car provides, which can often disguise deficiencies that drivers of a lesser calibre, like Stroll, get entangled trying to overcome.
As Stroll alludes to, that situation has unfolded at Aston Martin, placing him in a rut that, to this point, he hasn’t escaped.
“I think he has a particular driving style,” he added. “The way that he gets around the corners might be very different to mine.
“At the beginning of the year I think the car was giving a bigger window for different driving styles to work. And right now it has a lot of limitations that I don’t like that I think he kind of drives around and deals with and that doesn’t bother him as much.”
“I know we’ve changed the car a lot throughout the year and the characteristic of the car has changed a lot throughout the year,” he continued. “So maybe we moved away from something that suited me better at the beginning of the year.”
But while Aston Martin’s wayward car development has denied it any shot at placing second, it’s predominantly been Stroll’s lacklustre performance that is likely to cost the team even a top-four finish now.
Alonso extraordinarily highlighted at the start of the year that Stroll possessed World Champion potential, something he looks a million miles shy of at this moment in time.
Stroll can certainly point to the injury derailing his 2023 campaign from the outset – but, ultimately, he is in his seventh year in the top flight. There has been enough evidence to document his limitations as a driver and understand fundamentally how strong he is compared to the current crop.
As it stands, that level is nowhere near convincing enough for a side with championship aspirations, even in a secondary role alongside an established seasoned performer like Alonso.
With Aston Martin continuing to press on with moving into its new state-of-the-art headquarters at Silverstone, the British outfit could be poised to take a hard stance on Stroll’s seemingly untouchable status within the team if it wishes to transpire its current hopes of title success into a reality later on.
