Lance Stroll ‘angry’ about one advantage Aston Martin have given Fernando Alonso

Follow us on Google Discover

Lance Stroll is delivering a respectable performance up against two-time world champion Fernando Alonso at Aston Martin this season. With 24 points to his name, he sits just one spot below the Spaniard in the championship.

Granted, Alonso has nearly doubled his tally with 48. But Stroll has improved as the season has gone on. He’s beaten the 42-year-old in five of the last nine qualifying sessions, including Sprints, and since the Chinese Grand Prix in April, he’s scored virtually the same number of points (15 vs 17).

Alonso leads both the qualifying and race-day battles 8-5, but this nonetheless represents a marked improvement for Stroll. Indeed, the Canadian has already prevailed in more sessions than he did in the entirety of last year.

Stroll finished ahead at the Hungarian Grand Prix last weekend, but did so in controversial circumstances. In the closing stages of the race, he was running directly behind Alonso in 11th, but was on a favourable strategy.

As such the team decided to swap their cars in the hope that Stroll could reel in and pass ninth-place Yuki Tsunoda. If he couldn’t manage, the plan was to revert them back to their original positions.

But when Stroll failed, he ignored the team’s request to slow down and let Alonso re-pass. That meant he scored the final point in P10.

Lance Stroll ‘angry’ that Fernando Alonso had first chance to test Aston Martin upgrade

Auto Motor und Sport journalist Michael Schmidt offered what he saw as key context on the Formel Schmidt podcast. He says Stroll had been ‘angry’ earlier in the weekend.

This was because the team had allowed Alonso to run the updated AMR24 in the opening practice session. Stroll ran the older spec to offer the team a baseline for their analysis.

But the 25-year-old felt this gave his teammate a lasting advantage. He’d had more time to get used to the car’s revised handling.

• READ MORE: Everything you need to know about Aston Martin F1 Team from team principal to lineage

This may be part of the reason that he refused to comply with his team’s instructions during the race. It’s also worth noting that Stroll’s father Lawrence owns the team, potentially offering a degree of protection.

“I think it had a little history,” Schmidt said. “Stroll was angry that Alonso was allowed to drive this new package exclusively on Friday. One of them went to the technical briefing.”

Alonso made ‘sarky’ team radio comment to Stroll

It would be easy for Alonso to lose motivation right now. As a 32-time race-winner in the latter stages of his career, you could understand why he might have little appetite to scrap in the midfield.

Aston Martin started the season looking forward, battling with Mercedes and trying to bridge the gap to the top three. But they’ve lost considerable ground since, and now it’s unclear whether they’ll even score points at any given weekend.

During the FP1 session that was the source of Stroll’s anger, Alonso told the team ‘good luck’ when they asked for set-up guidance for the sister car. This ‘sarky’ message, in the words of Sky Sports F1’s Anthony Davidson, may point to his frustration.

To make matters worse, he was involved in a rather embarrassing mishap at the end of qualifying. The FIA directed Alonso to pull in behind the ‘APX GP’ car that’s being used to film Brad Pitt’s upcoming ‘F1’ movie, which prevented him from carrying out another run at the end of Q3.