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Formula 1 is in a great place, with a grid populated by both rising young stars and veteran champions with talent left. Somewhere in between is Lance Stroll, son of Canadian business magnate Lawrence Stroll. If the name Lawrence Stroll sounds vaguely familiar, that comes from his ownership of the Aston Martin F1 Team and a significant part of the Aston Martin road car operation. It makes Stroll the effective face of paid drivers in modern auto racing.
This is the eleventh episode of our driver-by-driver preview of the 2022 Formula One season. This weekend we will be covering Aston Martin Racing. You can find the rest of our previews here.
However, Stroll is more than his father’s name and checkbook. He has three podiums, one pole and five seasons of competent F1 racing under his belt. That makes him one of the most unique stories on the grid: a driver here solely for his funding who also happens to be very qualified for the role.
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HOW HE GET HERE
The broader answer to this question is no secret: Lance Stroll got into Formula 1 because his father is said to be a billionaire who owns a significant part of an entire car company. However, his actual resume is a little more compelling.
Stroll spent just three years in cars before entering F1, jumping two rungs down the ladder to enter the series after a successful 2016 Formula 3 Europe season. However, it was a remarkably strong season; Stroll convincingly won a title in a field that happened to include current Mercedes driver George Russell on his way up. It brought him to Williams in 2017, where he rebounded from his first three F1 races of his career, eventually clinching a podium in Baku.
He continued with Williams in 2018, a far less successful season in which he only scored points twice. At the same time, his father was looking for other opportunities for his son. That evaluation process eventually ended with Stroll buying what was then Force India and beating Nikita Mazepin’s similarly wealthy father for the honor. Not a single Formula 1 fan was surprised when Stroll joined the newly renamed Racing Point team in 2019.
Stroll didn’t make a splash with the better team in 2019 but the program seemed to catch fire in 2020 and he shone with the faster car. He scored his second and third career podiums and two more top five finishes, but the more prestigious highlight was his pole in an odd race on a slippery and unpredictable Istanbul Park Circuit.
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HOW 2021 WENT
Unfortunately for Stroll, the once again rebranded Aston Martin Racing lost that form entirely in 2021. A slight adjustment in downforce, which also cost Mercedes their dominant form, saw Aston Martin fall from fourth place in the constructors’ standings to a distant seventh place, clearly last in the modern mid-size class. With 13th place in the drivers’ standings, Stroll ended up in penultimate place in midfield.
The bright spot is that he finished just ahead of his teammate Sebastian Vettel in the standings, just nine points and one position behind, but he struggled to match the individual race bests that Vettel achieved (three top five finishes including one Best place of the season as second). in Baku) in the same car.
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TARGETS FOR 2022
Vettel provides an incredibly useful barometer for Stroll. The four-time world champion may have struggled in his final years at Ferrari, but he showed serious speed in a struggling car last year and proved he remains an F1 driver. With all due respect to Sergio Perez, he’s the best teammate Stroll has ever had and a great benchmark for how good Stroll actually is.
Stroll hasn’t passed the Vettel test for over a year. That doesn’t mean he can’t compete with the former champion at some point. Stroll’s surprisingly strong record as a rookie and in 2020 shows a little more upside than he anticipated when he joined the series; If he can ever beat Vettel it would go a long way towards ensuring that competitors take him seriously as more than just a team owner’s son.
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A SUCCESSFUL SEASON LOOKS LIKE THIS…
But Stroll’s success will depend in no small part on whether or not Aston Martin can compete with the other midfield teams, perhaps even with the teams at the top of the field, next season. This is a team that has now exceeded its budget under multiple names, team owners and driver pairings. It makes 2021 an unusually bad year and gives real hope that the team will improve in 2022.
Even with two podium finishes in 2020, Stroll has never finished in the top half of the drivers’ standings. For a good driver in a good Aston Martin team, that’s an achievable goal. Beating Vettel may seem an unrealistic goal for now, but finishing the season in tenth place or better is a manageable mark for Stroll to pursue next year.
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