F1 | Aston, Stroll slow at Suzuka: the most charged winger didn't pay

Lance Stroll's weekend was unfortunately not one to remember at the start of the season, as the Canadian finished the Japanese Grand Prix outside the points. Various elements had a negative impact, such as the difficulties in adapting to the new package introduced at Suzuka, tested by Stroll during Friday's free practice, but also a disappointing qualifying which, despite himself, relegated him to the last rows of the grid.

During the race, thanks to a potentially better pace than his rivals, he attempted to move up the grid, but finding himself behind always entails great difficulty starting from having to overtake his direct rivals for the top ten. Also taking advantage of an aggressive strategy that saw him start on the soft, the Aston Martin driver was able to recover a few positions, returning to twelfth place behind Yuki Tsunoda and Valtteri Bottas.

The team's decision to postpone the first pit stop compared to the other midfield teams who had started on the softer compound, as well as the fact that several drivers had chosen a harder and more flexible compound to lengthen the opening stint of the race, including Pierre Gasly and Logan Sargeant, meant that Stroll then slipped back to sixteenth position.

The Canadian tried everything to move up the rankings, including an alternative three-stop strategy, created keeping in mind the difficulties in overtaking his rivals, including the low top speeds on the straights compared to his rivals.

“The three stops was an almost desperate decision to try to get a point, because we made two less than optimal stops and then I found myself behind Tsunoda, eleventh, with the same type of tyres. At that point everything becomes very complicated and here it is already difficult to overtake,” Stroll himself explained at the end of the race, before mentioning the lack of speed on the sprints as one of the various problems that hindered his comeback. Given the serious difficulties in carrying out maneuvers on the sprints, Aston Martin also tried to play at a tactical level, distorting the strategy to switch to three stops against the opponents' two.

The idea was born because Stroll was on the same tires as Tsunoda, the hard ones, in fact also changed on the same lap, so there was no tire delta to exploit. The Silverstone team therefore decided to stop the Canadian after just twelve laps on the harder compound and even switch to the soft, with which he then had to complete almost 20 laps. It is no coincidence, in fact, that Stroll completed part of his overtaking corners, including a couple of nice maneuvers in the fast sequence of the first sector, such as the one on Esteban Ocon during the seventeenth lap on the outside of turn six.

Lance Stroll, Aston Martin AMR24

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

“With our lack of speed on the straight it didn't seem possible to make a comeback, so we thought we'd stop, put on a soft tire and try to catch Tsunoda at the end. But then the tire went down and we lost another position.”

During the same race, Stroll clearly complained about the difficulties of the AMR24 on the straight, so much so that he opened up via radio by saying a message that almost recalls another famous message said here at Suzuka in 2015, namely that “GP2 Engine” pronounced by Alonso in a moment of frustration: “It's incredible how poor our speed is on the straight. It's like a different category!” Stroll said via radio.

Part of the problems experienced by the Canadian on the sprints were caused by a rear wing that was perhaps too loaded, which probably could have been effective in clean air, but which in traffic instead represented a handicap in reaching higher maximums.

Comparison of the wings on Alonso and Stroll's cars at the Suzuka weekend

Photo credit: Aston Martin Racing

“It was really tough on straight line speed. I think we had the wrong rear wing on the car today. I had to do all my overtaking at Turn 6. I couldn't overtake anyone on the straights, just because of the lack of speed. I think today we could have done differently in terms of strategy”, added the Aston Martin driver.

In reality, Aston Martin brought two different specifications for Suzuka, with a lighter wing, used by Alonso both in qualifying and in the race, and a more loaded one, the one used by Stroll. In reality, both riders tried both solutions available, but after testing the more relaxed configuration also in FP3, Stroll chose to return to the more loaded one which guaranteed greater support in corners, clearly at the expense of a few km /h speed on straights.

For example, observing the references in qualifying between the two colors of the British team, one can see how the speed difference with DRS open before the braking section of Turn 1 is 4 km/h, while it remains slightly more contained on other sprints where it was not possible to exploit the mobile wing, descending to around 2 km/h.

The difficulties on the straight, as well as those in overtaking his rivals, meant that Stroll was also forced to overturn his strategy by focusing on something different, but in the end little changed in practice, given that he also suffered the comeback by Nico Hulkenberg: “Overall it was a difficult weekend, both yesterday and today. It was one of those weekends to forget,” said the Canadian.