Lance Stroll hasn’t drawn too much attention in recent races, but he has gotten a decent amount of points. In fact, he has outscored his teammate by a decent margin in the last six races. Given that Stroll is generally seen as a poor driver, I have to wonder: what’s going on?
Aston Martin came out of the gates swinging in 2023. Not only was their car an improvement over its predecessor, it was actually good. Really good. Good enough to challenge for pole position and get podiums in six of the first eight races. And even though the rest of the teams later caught up to Aston (and they may or may not have been busted using illegal parts on their car), the team still managed to get two more podiums and a comfortable fifth place in the standings.
Well, I say “the team”, but that was mostly down to Fernando Alonso. Every single one of those podiums was earned by Alonso, and while the Spaniard finished fourth in the standings, his teammate had to make do with tenth place. In fact, of the 280 points that Aston Martin got in 2023, 206 were earned by Alonso. His teammate only got a measly 74 all season. That teammate? Lance Stroll.
And that is not an outlier. Looking through his career, he has only defeated his teammate once. In 2018, Stroll was paired at Williams with Sergey Sirotkin. Stroll got six points that year and Sirotkin only one. In every other year, Stroll has been outperformed by his teammates. The margins differ, from only three points in 2017 to 122 points in 2023, but the result is always the same: Stroll loses, and usually quite badly.
Why is Stroll so bad?
Lance Stroll is what’s known as a pay driver: someone who didn’t earn his place in F1 on merit, but instead bought his way into the sport. His father Lawrence Stroll has spent literal billions to ensure that Lance stays in Formula 1. And before you say anything: yes, I know that all drivers bring money with them, and there are more drivers that currently have more financial benefits than competitive benefits. You can make a decent argument for both Zhou and Sargeant to fall into that category. But there is a difference between them and Stroll: they can both get fired. And if the rumors are to be believed, they both have their heads firmly on the chopping block right now.
| Year | Stroll points | Teammate points |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 40 | 43 |
| 2018 | 6 | 1 |
| 2019 | 21 | 52 |
| 2020 | 75 | 125 |
| 2021 | 34 | 43 |
| 2022 | 18 | 37 |
| 2023 | 74 | 206 |
| 2024* | 23 | 45 |
That will never happen with Stroll. His father isn’t just a sponsor or a big investor in the Aston Martin team, he quite literally owns the place. He bought the team back in 2018, swiftly kicked Esteban Ocon out to make room for Lance, and then two years later kicked Sergio Perez out to make room for Sebastian Vettel despite the fact that Perez was doing considerably better than Stroll that year.
That type of security means that you can get far too comfortable in your position. Stroll knows he doesn’t have to prove himself like the other drivers do, because he’s guaranteed a seat anyway. It doesn’t matter if he screws up, because the team will still fiercely defend him afterwards.
When Logan Sargeant crashes his car, team principal James Vowles will tell the media honestly that Sargeant needs to improve if he wants to remain in place. When Perez registers his third disappointing result in a row, Christian Horner will admit that it’s an unsustainable streak. But when Stroll got knocked out in Q1 in Qatar last year or when he totalled the car in qualifying in Singapore, team principal Mike Krack jumped to his defense and said that Stroll’s critics need to show more respect to him. Stroll doesn’t need to improve, because his results are irrelevant. As long as he wants to race there, he is guaranteed a seat.
That’s not to say Stroll can’t hold his own in F1. He has gotten a pole position and three podiums. But these are flashes of adequacy in a career that has been mediocre at best.
But he's doing good now, isn't he?
Back to 2024. At the start, it seemed like it would be more of the same. Stroll crashes in Saudi Arabia completely of his own accord, and only registered two points scoring finishes in the first six races while Alonso finished in the points in all six of them.
But then came the Imola Grand Prix. Alonso had an absolute stinker in qualifying and only got 19th, which was converted into a pitlane start after the team figured they might as well take a penalty and tinker with the car a bit more. Alonso was nowhere in the race and finished last of the running cars.
And since then, Stroll has actually outperformed Alonso. In those six races since and including Imola, Stroll scored 15 points compared to 10 for Alonso, and Stroll finished in the points three times while Alonso only did so twice. Qualifying isn’t much better either, with Alonso only doing better than Stroll in Spain and Austria, while Stroll outqualified his teammate in the four other races and in the Austrian sprintrace. So what gives?
I think there’s two reasons for it. The first is that Stroll is a mediocre driver, but the car is also just mediocre now. Aston Martin is definitely not able to challenge for podiums or pole position. In fact, it’s more preoccupied with Haas and Racing Bulls than with McLaren or Ferrari. I think that Stroll is just better at driving at this level of performance than Alonso. These kinds of results were bad when the car was good last year, but now they’re pretty acceptable. In short: the car is just more on the same level as Stroll.
The second reason I think is at play, is that Alonso is starting to get annoyed with Aston Martin. And when Alonso gets annoyed with an underperforming team, he begins to tune out a bit. His results drop off, his performances get lackluster, and he just sorta becomes invisible. We saw it at McLaren, we saw it at Alpine, we even saw it at Ferrari, and now we’re seeing it at Aston Martin. There are a lot of reports that Aston is doing its best to improve things again behind the scenes, including stealing a technical mastermind from Ferrari and trying to get Adrian Newey on board. It’s entirely possible that Alonso is just waiting for those results to pay off and in the meantime is not interested in giving it his all.
So no, Stroll is not suddenly a good driver, or a better driver than Alonso. The circumstances are just a bit more in his favor right now. If he keeps up this form when the car improves, then I might need to swallow my words. But until that moment, I will still consider that Aston Martin seat as a lost one that should go to a more deserving driver.