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Otmar Szafnauer has recalled the time Lance Stroll stayed quiet on the team radio after making a mistake while leading a Formula 1 race.
Szafnauer was the team principal at Force India before they rebranded into Racing Point and, most recently, Aston Martin.
The 61-year-old played a key role as he led the team into the top five on multiple occasions.
However, Szafnauer left Aston Martin back in 2022 to join Alpine before leaving the French outfit in 2023.
During his time in charge of Racing Point, Sergio Perez recorded the team’s only victory at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix.
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Otmar Szafnauer says Lance Stroll stayed quiet after making a ‘mistake’ while leading F1 race
Speaking on the High Performance Racing podcast, Szafnauer recalled the time that Stroll was leading the Turkish Grand Prix after qualifying on pole position.
He claimed that Stroll was leading by around 18 seconds when he went off track, but failed to report the mistake over his team radio, which meant he started dropping back.
Szafnauer said that had Stroll told the team about the mistake, they would have had enough of a lead to change his damaged front wing.
Szafnauer said: “He’s on pole, huge lead, 18-second lead. He’s running away with the race. Unbeknownst to us, he goes off, goes over a kerb, comes back on, says nothing. And we don’t know.
“When he went off, one of the strakes underneath the front wing got lodged in between all the other strakes, as opposed to just falling off.
“So, now, front wing down force gone. We started gaining the front tyres, understeer graining, and we just thought it was regular graining.”
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He continued: “But he didn’t tell us he went off. So, we call him in for new tyres, right? Still leading. Comes in, new tyres, four, five laps, pretty good. Start gaining again.
“Had we known, our lead was big enough to change the front wing, 12 seconds, 14 seconds, with an 18-second lead, but we didn’t know, and he went backwards.
“The crazy thing is, we could see it in the data, but we didn’t believe the data because it was so wet. It was so wet, so we thought all the little tubes were full of water. The little pressure taps, we thought, were full of water.”
In the end, it was Lewis Hamilton who won the race ahead of Perez and Sebastian Vettel, with Stroll finishing in ninth place.
The pole position at the 2020 Turkish Grand Prix remains Stroll’s only P1 start of his career to date.
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