Lance Stroll laments wrong rear wing and sub-optimal strategy amid his radio cry in F1 Japanese GP, as Mike Kracks reflects on it.
Stroll didn’t look great from practice onward when Aston Martin teammate Fernando Alonso set better pace. He started the weekend with the updates which the Spaniard got for Saturday. The pace difference continued still as the Canadian was knocked out in Q1 itself.
In general, the F1 Japanese GP circuit doesn’t suit Stroll, but it only worsened for him in the race. He went for a rare three stop in a bid to catch Visa Cash App RB’s Yuki Tsunoda for 10th, but eventually fell short especially due to lack of straightline speed.
That prompted him for the radio message, which sounded very similar to what Alonso had said in the days of McLaren-Honda. “It’s unbelievable how bad our speed is on the straight man,” Stroll said on the radio. “It’s like a different category.”
Post-race, Stroll defended his radio call noting about the lack of straightline speed and sub-optimal strategy. He revealed running a different rear wing to Alonso, which added to his misery. “It was very bad,” he said to media, when asked about his radio call.
“We just lacked straightline speed, I think we had the wrong rear wing on the car in the race. I had to overtake in Turn 6, I couldn’t pass anyone on the straight with the lack of straightline speed. The strategy too wasn’t good for me, just a difficult weekend for me overall whether qualifying or race, just a weekend to forget.
“The three stop was a desperate decision to get a point, we did a very sub-optimal two-stop and then I was behind Tsunoda on the same tyre, it was already hard to overtake with the straightline speed, it didn’t seem possible, so we pulled in to stop for soft with the hope to get him back at the end with the tyre,” summed up Stroll.
Team boss Krack confirmed of Stroll having a different rear wing, but didn’t think the two wings had too much difference. “We made the choice for qualifying, but there was a small difference, but not huge,” he said, while adding his thoughts about the radio call which the team thing was not down to power, but by situation around Stroll and his rivals’ tyre state.
“This is something I have looked at actually,” continued Krack. “So what you see across the field, then there is very small difference in terms of straightline performance. But what you have is at different times of the race, different tyre conditions, and the acceleration out of the corners is a different one.
“And I think a lot of these comments come from such situations. If you look at power limited data, you see that all the cars are very very similar, but the tyre conditions at various times of the race, you are offset by 10-12-15 laps of tyres, and then you accelerate completely different,” explained Krack.
When asked of the difference between Stroll and Alonso since Australia, Krack defended the Canadian by noting how the team put the driver in a difficult position in Suzuka, where he spent more time to collect data for their new update, which eventually proved costly after lack of running in FP2 and so on.
“We fell foul a little bit of our program and organisation,” said Krack. “At the end, we had the upgrade on his car and he lost time with the rake, then there was the red flag. It played a bit against him – all the time when he had then the tyres then everybody was long running or heavy running, then he was in traffic.
“Then we didn’t run FP2, so it played out against him a little bit, the whole thing. We’re analysing the cars, how the cars behaving and if they are behaving the same. We think we have found maybe one or two things that could explain the difference in qualifying. And I think for the race it was much better.”
Here’s Fernando Alonso on his late race tactics
Here’s how F1 Japanese GP panned out
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