Not just McLaren. The topic of team orders has been a hot topic in Hungary, especially for what happened in the Woking team, where a team decision somehow decided the finishing order, with Lando Norris having to give the first position back to Oscar Piastri after an undercut during the last stint.
But while Lando Norris reluctantly accepted McLaren’s decision to let his teammate through, things turned out differently at Aston Martin, as Lance Stroll turned down Fernando Alonso on the final lap in an attempt to attack ninth-placed Yuki Tsunoda.
To understand the reasons behind this choice, however, we need to take a step back to the start of the race, because that is where the cascading scenarios began that led the Canadian back to playing for ninth place and to the decision not to give the position back to his teammate.
Lance Stroll, Aston Martin AMR24, in the pits during qualifying
Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images
Thanks to an excellent qualifying with cooler conditions, where it usually manages to extract something more, Aston Martin had managed to monopolize the fourth row, an excellent result to hope to aim for some useful points to consolidate the fifth place in the constructors’ standings. However, compared to other teams, the Silverstone team started with a disadvantage: having only one set of mediums and one set of hard tyres to play for in the race, which led to the assumption that one of the three stints would have to be faced on the soft, despite the high risk of degradation.
However, Aston Martin was not the only team to choose to focus on a very aggressive first part of the race, perhaps to recover some positions at the lights to defend later. As was easy to imagine, the drivers who started with the softer compound were also the first to stop, triggering a sort of cascade effect that also led Racing Bulls and Aston Martin to react.
The Silverstone team thus chose to diversify the strategy, on the one hand calling Fernando Alonso to the pits to try to maintain the position on those who had stopped, while on the other they chose to leave Lance Stroll on the track to extend the stint. Knowing full well that the AMR24 is a car that is often aggressive on the tyres, the idea with the Canadian was to extend the initial stint as much as possible, going to cover those drivers who, on the contrary, had remained out. Furthermore, this would have given the chance to create a considerable tyre offset, or a delta in terms of tyre life, compared to those who had already returned to the pits.
It was here that the paths of the two Aston Martin drivers split, with Alonso ending up on a potentially more challenging strategy, which however also had a secondary purpose. The team’s idea was not only to cover the drivers who had already stopped, but also to slow down the group led by the Spaniard himself to give Stroll the chance to pull away as much as possible. A tactic also understood by other teams, who informed their drivers of Aston Martin’s plan by radio.
Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin AMR24, Lance Stroll, Aston Martin AMR24, Alex Albon, Williams FW46
Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images
Clearly, having stopped first, when both the British team’s drivers stopped, Alonso stayed ahead, undercutting his teammate and staying ahead of him for the entire second stint. Given the difference in tyre life, the middle part of the race also saw a similar dynamic to the opening, with Alonso stopping first once again, while Stroll continued for another eight laps.
At that point, after the waltz of pit stops, the situation was clear: Tsunoda in ninth position, but with more worn tyres having opted for a one-stop strategy, followed by the two Astons, who had the ambition of overtaking the Japanese driver.
With six laps to go, the team radioed Alonso to let Stroll pass as he had fresher tyres and, consequently, had a better chance of attacking the Racing Bulls driver. As often happens, however, in these situations a clause was added: if the Canadian was unable to pass Tsunoda, at that point he would have to give the position back to his teammate, moving Alonso up to tenth place, which would have been worth another point.
A message that, clearly, had been passed on to both drivers, with Stroll immediately letting his frustration show, opening the radio to say that, even without team orders, he would still have managed to overtake Alonso. In fact, it is true that in this way he had been given the chance to fight with Tsunoda for ninth place, but on the other hand he had been denied the possibility of challenging Alonso for the last available point.
Lance Stroll, Aston Martin AMR24
Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images
Although Stroll immediately showed a strong pace, gaining several tenths per lap on the Japanese driver, on the other hand, the more the race went on, the more his chances of overtaking the Racing Bulls driver seemed reduced. Precisely for this reason, the race engineer had suggested to Alonso to push to stay close to the duo in front of him, so that Oscar Piastri would not lap him and that Stroll could then give him the position back at the end.
Stroll chased Tsunoda throughout the final lap, but never managed to get close enough to attempt an overtaking, despite the team actually reminding him by radio that he would have to give up the position on the final lap. An order ignored, to which the Canadian did not respond, taking the flag in tenth position, the last valid to earn a point.
After the race, Alonso highlighted the strategic element of his race: “The strategy, I don’t think, was optimal. Obviously, it’s very easy to say that after the race. At that point, probably the team thought it was a good strategy. I was a bit surprised when we stopped on lap seven, because we had talked about it in the morning: our car is aggressive on the tyres, so if you stop on lap seven, you have 63 laps to do with a medium and a hard. So it was a challenge from that point on and we didn’t have the pace. The strategy didn’t help us,” said the Asturian.
#Stroll #explains #team #order #passed #Alonso