Stroll makes slight gains in second season with one of F1’s toughest team mates · RaceFans

Lance Stroll has gone up against some tough team mates in his Formula 1 career. One multiple champion replaced another alongside him at Aston Martin last year.

His father Lawrence Stroll clearly has the highest possible ambitions for the team he owns. For junior to play his role in that, he needs to at least demonstrate improvement alongside drivers who are much more experienced than him and have been far more successful than most.

That hasn’t always happened. In 2022, his second year alongside Sebastian Vettel, Stroll’s share of the team’s points score fell compared to the previous season. And his challenge only got tougher when Vettel’s replacement arrived.

The contest between the two Aston Martin drivers in 2023 was one of the most one-sided on the grid. Fernando Alonso reached the podium eight times, Stroll not once.

Even allowing for the injury Stroll carried into the start of last season, his form alongside Alonso was poor. He followed his team mate home 14 times in the 16 races where both finished, and was thumped 19-3 in qualifying. Stroll scored just 26% of the team’s points: Alonso out-scored him by almost a factor of three.

For their second year alongside each other, and Stroll’s sixth season at his father’s team, both drivers had to cope with a car which was far less competitive than they enjoyed the year before. Podiums were no longer a serious prospect and by the end of the season reaching the points had become an achievement

Despite that, this was a slightly better season for the team’s junior driver. He even led Alonso in the qualifying battle at one stage, going 4-3 up in Monaco, but only out-qualified his team mate once more over the remaining 15 rounds.

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Stroll also finished ahead of Alonso more often than last year. One of those occasions came in Australia, where Alonso took the chequered flag before his team mate, only to fall behind due to his penalty for an unorthodox piece of defensive driving while being pursued by George Russell.

Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin, Jeddah, 2024 — Fifth in Jeddah was as good as it got for Aston Martin

Despite that, there was one key metric where Stroll did not show an improvement compared to last year, and it was the bottom line: His contribution to the team’s points total. From that 26% last year it slipped to 24%. It’s no coincidence that at the time of writing Stroll is in the longest point-less streak of his entire career.

Last year Aston Martin’s failure to beat McLaren to fourth place in the constructors’ championship could reasonably be blamed on Stroll’s failure to get as much out of their car as Alonso did. The same cannot be said this year: The AMR24 was never realistically going to finish higher than fifth in the championship.

Still, given how slender McLaren’s winning margin over Ferrari was this year, Aston Martin should ask themselves whether their current driver line-up would have delivered a constructors’ title had they built an MCL38.