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Lance Stroll battled hard in a bid to score his first points of the 2022 F1 season, but fell narrowly short late in the Australian Grand Prix.
It began with Lance working his way up the field with a combination of good strategy from his team and strong racecraft on track.
Lance initially started 19th on the Hard compound Pirelli tyres.
An early Safety Car on lap three of 58 for the Ferrari of Carlos Sainz Jr allowed Lance and the team to run a bold strategy when the Canadian pitted for the Medium tyres on the same lap.
A lap later, Lance made his second stop, switching back onto the Hard tyres, negating the need to use any other compound and allowing him to potentially run to the end of the race on the Hard tyre.
Once the Safety Car returned to the pits, racing resumed and Lance began making headway through the field, moving onto the fringes of the top 10 as he battled against the Williams of Alex Albon.
On lap 23, a second Safety Car, caused by team-mate Sebastian Vettel, allowed Lance the chance to dive into the pits for a second set of Hard tyres, re-joining in 13th.
Lance continued to progress and made his way into the top 10 when Max Verstappen caused a Virtual Safety Car.
The Canadian battled against Pierre Gasly and the two Alfa Romeos in the closing stages of the race for the final point scoring position but narrowly missed out.
A five-second penalty for weaving on the straights meant Lance ended the race in 12th position.
Lance Stroll – Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula One™ Team Driver
“We did not quite have the pace for points today, although we were able to defend a position inside the top 10 for a while late on. I think we had the right idea with our strategy by running the majority of the race on the Hard tyre, but we will look over the data and see what else we can learn. The five-second penalty was frustrating, even though it did not change our final race position. I caught Valtteri [Bottas] after the Virtual Safety Car and made up a place so it was frustrating to receive a penalty for weaving. I also want to say thank you to the team once again: everybody did a tremendous job to get the cars repaired this weekend. We will keep our heads up and dig deep to try to extract more from the car in the races to come.”
Albert Park
