Every weekend, Lance Stroll has to state a case for why he still belongs in F1. He’s in his eighth year in the sport, and as each race continues, the unshakable claim that he’s only in the sport because of his team-owner billionaire father becomes more and more prevalent.
While this season has been shaky for the entire Aston Martin team, Stroll’s performance at the F1 Brazil GP was proof that maybe the claim may continue to be true.
As drivers were tackling the formation lap in São Paulo on a rainy Sunday afternoon, Stroll lost control of the car at turn 4 as he looked to warm up his brakes and tyres.
Then, while attempting to reverse out, he beached the car in the gravel, ending his race before it even got going, and aborting the start for the other drivers for another few minutes.
As it unfolded, Stroll’s race engineer Ben Michell gave him simple instructions to follow on the formation lap.
“Okay Lance, we need you to build a gap at turn one, build a gap at turn one, and then lean on the tyres. One, two, three, and then some weaving down to turn four.
“We can still afford more clutch slip, half a second more. So high speed weaving now, and then 150 metre lift into turn four.”
Then, Stroll went on the radio to deliver the news.
“I crashed, I’ll try and restart.”
BM: “You can reverse — you’re going to have to come into the pit lane.”
BM: “Okay Lance, enter the pit lane when you come back.”
LS: “Beached it. I’m beached. Yeah, I’m beached.”
BM: “Okay, engine off. Engine off.”
Stroll took the time to address his mishap during the formation lap, as he called the initial loss under braking “really strange” and said that there may have been an issue with the car that caused him to spin.
“As soon as I touched the brake I just had a huge rear lock and then I was a passenger from there, I’ve never felt that in the car, so maybe there was a brake failure problem and we have to look into it.”
Due to the unpredictability of the race, especially since Max Verstappen won from starting in P17, this could have been a good opportunity to score points for the team, but now they can only think of what could’ve been.
“For sure in a race like this anything’s possible, so to be out on Lap 1 really sucks – but we have to look into what happened.”
