Lance Stroll's nightmare weekend continues to go from bad to worse, after the Aston Martin driver ended up finishing bottom in qualifying ensuring that he will start the Italian Grand Prix from the back of the grid.
Stroll was sidelined for the first practice session on Friday, with the team loaning out his seat to reserve driver Felipe Drugovich.
But when Stroll finally got in the cockpit and headed out in the afternoon, the AMR23 suffered a fuel system failure and Stroll had been required to pull over and park the car before completing a single timed lap.
Stroll did finally get some track time in during final practice on Saturday, completing 31 laps and ending the session in P11, but he still faced an uphill battle when it came to qualifying.
"It was a tricky session on track; I just wasn’t feeling any grip from the tyres so I couldn’t push where I needed to," he said.
“I’m not sure if it was no laps yesterday or just generally in the session, just not getting to grips with it," he told the media back in the paddock. "But we’ve got to look into what happened because it was the worst session I think we’ve ever had.
“I didn’t do a lot yesterday,” he admitted. "But I think there was just still something going on today in the car that didn’t make sense, so we’ve got to look into it.
"We’ll regroup as a team this evening and look through the data to see if we can identify where things went wrong today.
Stroll's situation had been made worse by the Alternative Tyre Allocation system in use this week, limiting the number of tyres available to the drivers while requiring them to run on each compound in turn in each round of qualifying.
It meant Stroll was using the hard compound in Q1 having had little chance to get any experience with them. In the end his lap was almost 1.3s off the top time set by Max Verstappen in the first round.
"Lance struggled for grip on the hard tyres," explained Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack. "He missed so much track time yesterday and that compromised his preparation."
“Everyone’s on the hard tyre,” Stroll conceded. “I definitely felt like the soft was much better in FP3 than the hard. But it looked like everyone, even on the hard tyre, was able to go a lot quicker than the soft in FP3 so I’m not really sure.”
Looking forward, Stroll didn't hold out a lot of hope that he would be able to make much of a recovery from the back in tomorrow's race. “We’re going to have to look into it but it’s going to be a hard race from 20th," he said
"The race will be tough – I’ve got a big job to do – but we’ll be prepared for anything that comes our way.”
His boss agreed: "We will need to be opportunistic tomorrow to bring Lance up the field and we will be reliant on the fortunes of others to some extent," said Krack. "There is still a long race ahead and we will give it everything tomorrow to try and bring home some points to minimise the damage.”
Stroll's team mate Fernando Alonso - who was runner-up last week in Zandvoort - also had a tougher time this weekend and will start from tenth on the grid.
“It wasn’t our best qualifying today finishing in tenth position," Alonso admitted. "But we still managed to make Q3 again and it means we can fight for points tomorrow.
"There are no points awarded for today and our strength has been on Sundays so we will hope for an unusual race tomorrow and look to capitalise on any opportunities.”
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