Lance Stroll has admitted that Aston Martin are in an unwanted place after the first nine Grand Prix of 2024 but it is not an ‘overnight fix’ to resolve why they ‘suffered’.
The team from Silverstone are fifth in the constructors’ championship after the Canadian GP with 58 points. Stroll brought his AMR24 home inside the top 10 in Montreal to award Aston Martin a double-point-scoring finish alongside Fernando Alonso. The pair sealed P7 and P6.
Stroll ended his home race six seconds off his teammate, too, having improved on qualifying in ninth place. The 25-year-old from Montreal gained positions from Visa Cash App RB pilots Daniel Ricciardo and Yuki Tsunoda. It was Stroll’s best result at a Canadian GP in his career.
Lance Stroll admits Aston Martin do not have an ‘overnight fix’ to secure better results
But the Canadian GP also yielded only Stroll’s fourth points-scoring finish of the season thus far. He also finished the Bahrain GP in P10, the Australian GP in a campaign-best P6 and the Emilia Romagna GP in P9. Alonso has seven top-10 finishes this year with a best result of P5.
Alonso further secured his best result of the year at the Saudi Arabian GP after qualifying in fourth place. Stroll feels that Aston Martin started the 2024 season with a quick car when in qualifying trim. Yet the team ‘suffered’ due to the AMR24 destroying its tyres at a rapid rate.
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Now, Stroll also feels the single-lap pace that Aston Martin enjoyed earlier in the season has started to fade. So, the team are in an unwanted place of having to fight for the lower point-scoring places. Alonso’s P6 in the Canadian GP was the team’s best result in five Grand Prix.
“We were always fighting [in the] top five [last year],” he said, via Formula 1’s website. “And then again this year, I think we were quick over one lap at the beginning of the year, suffered a little bit more with [tyre degradation], but we were still kind of top five, top seven range.
“Now, we’re kind of scrapping for a point or two on a good weekend, which is not what we want as a team. I think we definitely do understand our issues. I think we understand some of the decisions and directions that we’ve chosen to follow through with.
“We know some of the mistakes that we’ve made. Now it’s just a matter of sorting ourselves out and putting some new upgrades on the car going forward that address some of these issues that we know we have. But it’s not an overnight fix.”
Aston Martin are 117 points worse off after nine rounds in 2024 compared to 2023
Aston Martin are somewhat in no-man’s land sitting fifth in the constructors’ standings with 58 points so far this year. Mercedes sit in fourth place with 124 points and Visa Cash App RB are sixth with 28 points. But their position marks a huge decline for Aston Martin from 2023.
The Austrian GP marked round nine of the 2023 season and Aston Martin left it as F1’s third-best team. Alonso joining from Alpine helped the Silverstone squad to score 175 points with the Spaniard penning 131 of them. Just Red Bull (377) and Mercedes (178) had more points.
Yet Aston Martin suffering with tyre degradation and also now losing their single-lap speed, as Stroll notes, has left them 117 points worse off in 2024. Alonso is even 90 points short of his 2023 tally after nine rounds, while Stroll has 17 points this year compared to 44 in 2023.
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