Lance Stroll: 'Fernando is faster than me. I have to figure out how to go quicker'

It feels a long time ago now, but Stroll broke both wrists and a toe in his biking accident back in February, yet 15 days later he was racing in the Bahrain Grand Prix.

And more than racing, he was scoring solid points, finishing sixth to back-up Fernando Alonso’s third place as Aston Martin made a stunning start to the year. Not that Stroll – as proud as he was of making the comeback – reflects on the race itself in positive fashion.

“I was actually a bit disappointed after the weekend, because I felt like I didn’t drive a great race,” he tells Motor Sport. “In all honesty, I was happy to be in the car, but there were things I didn’t do in the test – I didn’t get to do any long runs in the test. So I didn’t really do any long runs on the medium tyre before the race, then I pushed it a little bit too hard, and I degged it early, and then I had to get on the hard a bit earlier than the others.

“I saw [Lewis] Hamilton was a second and a half up the road and [Carlos] Sainz was just in front of him, and then I kind of realized after ‘F**k, if I would have driven that medium tyre stint a little bit better. I think I could have picked them off no problem with the car pace we had’.

“So I was really frustrated about that. But that’s just me being a racing driver.”

There have been a lot of frustrations for Stroll this year, which are sometimes allowed to overshadow the racing driver part. Regularly seeing his place in F1 called into question due to his father’s ownership of Aston Martin, the fact he is still a high quality driver rarely gets the credit it deserves. That’s not to say he’s produced many results this season to quieten his critics, but on the few occasions he has matched or even beaten Fernando Alonso in the same car – think Spain or qualifying in Austria and the sprint – Stroll still doesn’t seem to win over many fans.

“I don’t really pay too much attention to that. I know more myself deep down when I do a good job, and I extract the most from the car. Whether I’m ahead or behind them I know when I should be patting myself on the shoulder, or the first one to kind of criticise myself in a constructive way, learn from it and come back stronger.

“I know that there’s been a lot of races where I felt like I maybe got the most out of the car, and he was a little bit quicker, and that’s just how it is. And other times where I really drove well and I was in front of him a couple of times. So, yeah, I’m proud of that. But for sure, he’s been at a very high level throughout the year, he’s made very few mistakes – no mistakes – and you have to give him credit for that, because he’s been driving at an extremely high level, and really getting the most out of the car every week.

“But like I said, I’m kind of more just focused on my own stuff, I’m not really listening to too much of that noise on the outside, because it’s F1. When you have a bad day, there’s always going to be a reason why, when you have a good day, it’s kind of just normal. I think that’s how a lot of F1 is, or my experience of it over the years.

“But I just know that when I get the most out of myself and the day, I’m happy about that, I’m proud of that. And the days where I don’t I’m the first one to admit that and think to myself ‘I gotta come back stronger next week’.

“He’s just been at a really high level throughout the whole season, and delivering that kind of A-plus kind of performance every week, when I’ve had a few kind of A’s, but I’ve had some Cs and it’s been a little bit more challenging. But a lot of racing left to go.”

And it is those Cs – or perhaps even lower on some occasions – that open him up to even more criticism this year. The fair way of looking at it isn’t about his place on the F1 grid (he has a pole position in the toughest circumstances and multiple podiums, plus room to grow at still just 24), but whether he’s doing enough to warrant an Aston Martin seat if the team was under different ownership.

The car’s the strongest he’s ever had at his disposal, and while Alonso has six trophies to show from the first half of the year, Stroll hasn’t been close to one. As a team now fighting with Mercedes and Ferrari for second in the constructors’ championship, that’s not helping those hopes.

If there’s one excuse Stroll could pull out to explain the massive points deficit this season – he sits 102 behind his team-mate – it’s that the car was at its most competitive when he was still recovering from injury, feeling he only got to 100% again in Monaco, by which time Alonso already had four podiums under his belt.

Put that to him, though, and he suggests there would still be a big deficit regardless of his bike crash given the way some weekends have panned out.

“Hopefully we get back to a stage where we’re that competitive. I do believe we can do that. I mean, it definitely didn’t help to miss 250 laps of testing or whatever it was, and just be physically not at my best earlier on in the season. However, I think more than my injury we probably got hurt more by bad fortune on the track.

“We were running fourth in Jeddah and then we had the engine issue. We were competitive as a team in Miami, but we had a very bad qualifying, so we were on the back foot there on a track you can’t overtake. Same thing in Monaco again, we hit [Lando] Norris’ debris in Q2, and that was just the end of our session starting 14th, and at a track where you want to be up at the front.

“So, those are some of our most competitive races, and I think we got more hurt by… I don’t like to use the word, but I guess bad luck in a way – misfortune, whatever you want to call it – rather than my injury.”

It’s perhaps the typical racing driver excuse, to put poorer results than their team-mate down to circumstance rather than ability, but Stroll at least has the humility to know that when he has put it together he has still been missing something this year.

“I think this year is honestly a lot of things that are out of our control that have really affected us. And I think if we have clean weekends, the results will be better. That’s what I honestly believe, but also just getting more out of the car and driving a bit faster because right now Fernando has generally been faster than me. So I have to figure out how to go a little bit faster round the corners. Simple… That’s what we’re here to do, right?”

We might laugh about it being simple, but not only would Stroll be quicker in terms of lap time, it would also be the quickest way he is ever going to quieten critics. While team members at Aston Martin say he is underestimated for his work ethic and feedback to help improve the car, results are all any driver will be truly judged on and given he feels the lack of those are partly out of his now-fixed hands, Stroll has his own way of not letting scrutiny get to him.

“I don’t read the stuff, so it doesn’t frustrate me… You’re on social media, I’m not during the week!

“I’m playing Xbox with my friends or – I used to mountain bike but I’m not allowed to do that anymore! In the winter, I’m snowboarding. I’m on the golf course, playing tennis. I’m doing other things that I can’t really speak about in the interview… So I mean, there’s not a lot of time to be on social media.

“There’s a big wide world out there. That’s where my head’s at.”