Lance Stroll was again left frustrated with his latest Aston Martin weekend in contrast to team-mate Fernando Alonso who claimed a fourth third-place finish from five races.
Stroll’s race was effectively over before it had started courtesy of Aston Martin undertaking a risky one-tyre-run strategy in qualifying that ultimately backfired as the Canadian started a wretched Miami Grand Prix from 18th on the grid.
Conversely, Alonso was on the front row in second – fortuitously so given a late red flag sparked by a crash from Charles Leclerc in his Ferrari.
The two-time F1 champion was unable to take full advantage of his stroke of luck as he had to settle for third by the end of the 57-lap race, with Stroll 12th, just two seconds outside of a points-paying top-10 finish.
“It’s great for the team but I’m pretty pissed off at my weekend,” said Stroll. “I didn’t score points, I wanted more out of it.
“It was just a tough race, with a DRS train the whole way, but the damage was done (in qualifying). So a tough one.”
Stroll to speak with team about Miami radio silence
Reflecting on the team’s gamble not to send him out of a fresh set of tyres in Q1 that would almost certainly have granted him safe passage into Q2, Stroll added: “It’s part of racing. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong.
“If we’d have gotten through then we would have had two (sets of new tyres) in Q2, or potentially Q3, and that could have benefited us.
“With hindsight, it’s always easy to look at things you could have done differently.
“For sure, getting through Q1 and having a straightforward qualifying, putting us in a better position, would have made the race much better.
“At the beginning (of the race) , I kind of knew what it was going be like, and that unless we got a safety car or something, you know, late into the hard, from the first stint, I knew it was going to be difficult to get much out of it.”
Stroll even had to give his team a wake-up call midway as he complained about a lack of information being fed to him.
“I just felt I was stuck in traffic, and there wasn’t much happening in the race,” said Stroll.”I just wanted to know what was going on and maybe take an alternative strategy.
“We’ll speak about it. It was just a hard race. There was no degradation and it was difficult to overtake, so when it’s like that, it’s always tough when you start at the back.”
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