Lance Stroll, downhill and without brakes: why does everything go wrong for Fernando Alonso's partner?

With two laps to go in the sprint race in Austin, Lance Stroll sent a terse message over Aston Martin's radio: “I need to pit.. “No brakes”. Just a minute earlier, the Canadian had given up position to Daniel Ricciardo and Fernando Alonso, given that he had also failed to keep his medium tire. “He's letting you pass, because his tires are dead,” they warned the Asturian, who as soon as he crossed the finish line, in thirteenth position, asked about the order of finish and the situation of his teammate.. Once again, Stroll was leaving empty-handed.

Aston Martin's decline in the second half of the World Championship has made Stroll even more evident, eliminated in Q1, without exception, during the last seven races. Not even this Saturday, when Alonso lost three positions in the first lap, could Lance finish ahead of the two-time champion. Without grip, struggling to keep the AMR-23 on the track, the Aston Martin drivers experienced a new ordeal. Its performance, even below AlphaTauri, spoke very poorly of the package of aerodynamic improvements that they have debuted in Texas. As if that were not enough, Stroll signed his signature for the only abandonment of the sprint race.

And in the first lap he had shown striking aggressiveness against Alonso, whom he challenged at the turn 11 hairpin.. After a kilometer of straight, the man from Oviedo was pushed by his teammate towards the asphalt escape at turn 12.. The situation would remain stable until the aforementioned lap 17, when Stroll launched his distress call.. A repeat of what he experienced during the only free session of the weekend, when he only lasted five laps due to his front brakes overheating.

Based on monosyllables

A very precarious situation that extremely compromises the chances of reaching the checkered flag today.. At this point it seems more than evident that Aston Martin has not got the settings of its cars right, so in the next few hours they could change them, breaking the regulatory seals of the Parc Fermé.. If cooling is privileged, the performance of the AMR-23 would decline even more. “I've been thinking about it since yesterday. It is better to learn something about the car with a new set-up than to do 56 laps just to do them,” said Alonso, who today starts seventeenth.. The explanations of Stroll, penultimate on the grid, were much more confusing. “We will regroup tonight – with the advantage of having ridden a little more – and we will prepare to go out again tomorrow,” he said.. At least this time he did get out of monosyllables.

Because during Friday's press conference, the question was asked with as much assertiveness as it was polite.. “Obviously, the last race was quite frustrating for you, because the FIA told you off.. I was wondering if you've patched things up with the person you pushed in the back of the garage in Qatar, because we saw the footage on TV.. I was just wondering: Have you fixed that relationship? Are you still enjoying F1?” In the press room at the Circuit of the Americas, lounging to the left of Carlos Sainz, with the same apathy of the last two months, Stroll responded in the most concise way possible: “Yes and yes.” .

The person The Sun journalist was referring to was Henry Howe, Stroll's personal trainer, whom he angrily got rid of just after another frustrating day.. The Canadian, who had already thrown his steering wheel in front of the cameras, must have still felt lucky due to the benevolence of the FIA, which limited itself to giving him a written warning.. Five years ago, during a similar episode against Esteban Ocon at Interlagos, Max Verstappen was punished with two days of community service.

In any case, what happened on the asphalt two weeks ago in Losail, when his time was 1.1 seconds behind Alonso, has been reissued at the Circuit of the Americas. Since that rainy Saturday in Spa, at the end of July, his accumulation of misfortunes is only comparable to that of Logan Sargeant, the worst driver in the World Championship.. At Monza, where he was replaced on Friday by Felipe Drugovich, Stroll set the slowest time and started last; In Singapore he suffered a serious accident at the end of Q1 that would not even allow him to start; At Suzuka, a couple of tenths left him out of Q2, before another problem with the wing forced his retirement when he had only completed 20 laps.. And today he will start second to last in Austin, only ahead of Sargeant, whose future at Williams has been hopelessly twisted.

Stroll's situation at the Silverstone team, however, seems different. At least, as long as his father Lawrence maintains his intrepid adventure as owner. “At the beginning of the season, Lance did a heroic job to recover from his two broken wrists and since then he has had a lot of bad luck,” said the magnate, whose fortune is around 3 billion euros, before traveling to Texas.. That bicycle accident was obviously going to make it difficult for Lance to adapt to the AMR-23, with which he has only scored 47 points in 17 races (146 less than Alonso). “He had nine retirements due to engine failures,” added the father, completely unaware of the official data, which records a single breakage in the power unit, back in March, at the Saudi Arabia GP.

At the beginning of September, Mike Krack, Aston Martin's main team, also had to come forward when they insisted on Stroll's inability to keep up with Alonso: “There is not a big difference in performance, but in points”. That analysis collides with the forcefulness of the statistics, since Stroll accumulates a deficit of 56 hundredths against the Asturian in the qualifying sessions.. And in the 13 races that both finished, their average was 4.7 positions behind at the finish line. Two weeks ago, on one of the rare occasions in which he left the monosyllables, he himself had to admit it: “Fernando has a special style of driving.”. Now, the car has many limitations and he can overcome them better.”