With a quarter of the season completed, almost no one at Aston Martin will be pleased with their points total.
The team has amassed just 14 points over the opening six rounds. That’s one-third of what they had this time last season. Roll back to 2023 and they scored more than that in the first race alone and were already well into triple-figures by this point.
But if one driver in the green team can take some gratification from their points situation, it’s the one who scored them all. Not their two-times world champion Fernando Alonso, but his team mate, the much-maligned Lance Stroll, son of team owner Lawrence.
This is very much against the run of play. Only once in his eight seasons in F1 has Stroll out-scored a team mate over the course of the year. That was in 2018, his second campaign, when he partnered rookie Sergey Sirotkin in a conspicuously inexperienced pairing at Williams, and they mustered just three points finishes between them.
Aside from that, Stroll has been out-scored by the driver alongside him every time:
*After six of 24 rounds NB. Massa missed one round in 2017, Perez missed two rounds in 2020, Stroll missed one round in 2020, Vettel missed two rounds in 2022.
What should we make of Stroll’s performance prior to this season and over the past six rounds in which he’s out-scored Alonso?
Sirotkin (left) lost to Stroll in 2018
Stroll’s supporters would point to the quality of his team mates. Sergio Perez was a race winner, Sebastian Vettel a four-times champion and Alonso a double champion arguably closer to the peak of his powers than pre-retirement Vettel was. It would ask a lot of any driver to be measured against these benchmarks and Stroll’s slender points deficits to some of them are nothing to be ashamed of.
For his detractors, Stroll losing to his team mates in seven out of eight seasons is proof of a driver who’s been promoted beyond his ability. He’s had a few high points over his career and hasn’t had the crashing tendencies which undid some junior careers, but fundamentally he tends to be slower than his team mates over a single flying lap which means he usually finishes behind them.
That’s consistently been the case whether his team mate was Perez or a two-times world champion like Alonso. The gap between them fluctuates depending on the quality of the car. The 2023 Aston Martin was so strong, Alonso was claiming podium finishes with Stroll a few places behind in the second half of the top 10. In a slower car last year, Alonso consistently reached the lower points places while Stroll only got there occasionally.
At the same time, Stroll’s capacity for improvement and the value of his accumulated experience should not be overlooked. It’s eight years since his debut as an 18-year-old, the second-youngest Formula 1 driver of all time. With 172 starts to his name, he became Canada’s most experienced F1 driver ever last year. Whether he would have got the same chance to gather experience based on his results had his teams not been owned or subsidised by his father will remain a matter of conjecture.
So how significant is it that 2025-specification Lance Stroll is ahead of 2025-specification Alonso? This is the most experienced F1 driver ever, 43 years old and still nurturing hopes of challenging for a third world championship should the combined might of Stroll’s billions, Honda and Adrian Newey deliver in 2026.
Stroll opened his account at the first race in Melbourne, which was held in the kind of treacherous conditions where he’s excelled in the past (notably Istanbul 2020). Still, he was running behind his team mate when Alonso hit a patch of gravel which had been thrown onto the track at turn seven, and crashed.
Alonso insists he’s as quick as ever
Although Stroll didn’t add to his tally at the sprint race in China, he came close, only dropping out of the points places in the sprint race with three laps to go. After taking 12th on the road in the grand prix he was promoted three places, picking up two points, when others were disqualified. But Alonso had been running two places ahead of him when he suffered brake failure on lap four.
Alonso has been consistently quick, almost always out-qualifying Stroll, and finishing well ahead at times. But on those occasions, like at Suzuka where he came 11th, few or none of their rivals retired, ensuring the top 10 places were locked out. He took 11th again at Jeddah, no doubt ruing his lapse after the restart which allowed Isack Hadjar ahead of him into an eventual 10th place.
The sprint race in Miami brought more frustration for Alonso. Stroll, running well out of the points in 11th, gambled on an early pit stop for slicks as the track dried and again showed a great touch on a low-grip track. Alonso, eighth, found the team resistant to risking his position and pitted late. That left him vulnerable to those who came in early and warmed their tyres up, such as Liam Lawson, who bundled Alonso into a barrier as he tried to pass. More post-race penalties promoted Stroll to a surprise fifth.
The upshot is, Stroll is tied on 14 points with ninth-placed Esteban Ocon. Meanwhile Alonso has made his worst start to a season since he last drove a McLaren-Honda, during his team mate’s debut season.
Stroll’s performances haven’t shown a sudden marked improvement, but he has taken advantage of the opportunities which have come his way. It’s fair to say Alonso has had more than his share of misfortune, and the cards simply haven’t fallen for him yet.
A well-timed pit stop paid off for Stroll in Miami
Is Alonso’s speed fading with age? Is he letting opportunities slip which he would once have pounced on? He is certain he’s still at the peak of his considerable powers. “I’m as fast as in 2004,” he said earlier this year. “This is what I feel – or faster, now.”
With three-quarters of the season left to run, it would be a surprise if Alonso did not continue to lead Stroll on raw pace the majority of the time. The key question is whether Aston Martin’s car is going to be quick enough to challenge for points often enough for Alonso to reverse his current deficit. They had the slowest car at the last round and as they focus on the opportunity offered by the 2026 rules change, there may not be much in the pipeline to make the AMR25 more competitive.
It would have seemed unlikely two years ago when Alonso hammered Stroll in the points standings, but the opportunity for a reversal undoubtedly exists.
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