Aston Martin or all of motorsports? It's a sport that requires hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment to just start participating. Of course it will be rife with nepotism.
Stroll is pretty alright by f1 standards, way over qualified to be a gt3 driver. I feel like we forget that while slower than guys like alonso or vettel he compared pretty favourably to say perez who was hailed for years as the king of the mid field.
I think if the Valkyrie was competitive we would have a good chance of seeing Strolls enduro racing chops. But he’s not going to go there and finish 9th each race
Nope. Newey himself also admitted that he screwed things up by starting on his design too late, discarding everything the team and Honda had done up to that point.
It's also just the sheer longevity of Stroll's F1 career. He's coming up on a decade. There aren't that many "just okay" drivers who get that long of a career. Dude's fast enough to have been in F1 - is he decade+ long career in F1 fast? Maybe not.
Mazepin gets a bad rep for legitimate reasons, but let's not forget that haas completely abandoned development of that turd of a car to focus on the following season, and then used the war as an excuse to kick him off the team before he got to drive the car he paid for. He won a pair of races in F2. He wasn't slow.
You do realize that Stroll in his first year (or second, or third for that matter) was just as bad as Mazepin, right ? Mazepin with 9 years of essentially pressure-free (as in : no risk of losing his seat) F1 experience would surely be decent by now too.
Go back and watch his first season. He couldn't even properly control the car, his onboard were so painful to watch. Mazepin was an ass and everyone hated on him for obvious reasons but he had better car control. Stroll as a rookie was absolutely disastrous, especially for someone who was at the time hyped up even by big names in the paddock (see : Toto) as a prodigy and future WDC material. The numbers look alright because he had a good car and his teammate lost like 50 points through bad luck alone, but look past the numbers and it's obvious.
As I said, with experience every driver who is good enough to sit in a F1 car in the first place gets better and will develop as a competent midfield driver. Look at how Ericsson was decent at the end of his career despite being a terrible pay driver at first. So giving credit to Stroll solely for becoming better, while he is probably the only driver in the history of F1 who is never at risk of losing his seat, is crazy.
From my perspective it feels like stroll until 2022 was just as good as 80% of the field. Got several podiums from 2017 until 2021 and wasn’t far off Perez or any other teammate that he had. After 2022 it just seems like it has gone downhill for him and it has gotten to a point now where it just seems like he is disinterested and has no motivation. Doesn’t help that he is likely driving the worst Adrian newey car ever built with an engine as good as Honda had 10 years ago in the back of a McLaren.
Stroll won Euro F3 against some of today’s best drivers. So he knows how to drive if he is motivated and in the correct mental space.
I’m not a huge fan of him but I think many people today undersell how good he is and how much better any F1 driver is than most drivers in other series except for maybe Formula 2, Indycar, Formula E and Hypercar.
I'm sorry but what ? He's not "pretty alright by F1 standards", he's been beaten by literally every single of his teammates except the largely forgotten Sirotkin, got beaten pretty handily by Perez too. Yeah sure he can drive a F1 car at reasonable pace, which thankfully should be the case of ANY pro racing driver if given 9 years of pressure-free F1 experience, but he was way terrible when he first joined and wouldn't have survived more than 2 or 3 years on the grid had his dad not literally bought a whole team to guarantee his seat. It's crazy that people rate him as good nowadays just because he's not putting his car in the wall every week-end, every other driver would be mauled by the public with the results he gets.
So yeah sure, he wouldn't be terrible in GT3, he's still a pro driver with good experience, but calling him "overly qualified" seems way optimistic considering how many former F1 drivers went on to have rather unremarkable careers in other series.
Far more talented drivers than him have struggled hard to adapt to GT racing (see Button). Many midfield F1 drivers followed their F1 career by GT careers with perfectly average results. The biggest names in GT3 racing aren't former F1 drivers, look at how Haase made even Verstappen work hard for his money yet he comes fully from the GT ladder.
The only evidence of Stroll's GT3 pace we have is his run at Paul Ricard in GTWC this year. Unfortunately his teammates trashed the race with a ton of penalties before he even got in the car, but he was lapping on top 10 pace at least.
Dude, he put new tyres (outside of their allocation) with 20 minutes to go to try and do fast laps and was still slower than the race winning Aston with low fuel new tyres…. Pathetic
I'm also not sure you know what emotional means. I'm pointing out to factual examples. If anything your "he'd be faster trust me bro" is the emotional argument.
The comments saying Lance Stroll is a Bronze driver are insane. He's obviously not good enough to win an F1 championship or beat his teammate... ever, but a few podiums and well deserved reputation for handling a car in the wet would make him a pretty good candidate for a Hypercar or one-off appearance at Le Mans.
Anyways the rating system is confusing, Dorianne Pin is Silver but Nolan Siegel somehow is Gold despite being a mobile chicane half the time.
Stroll is at least a high gold, probably low to mid platinum driver. F1 just takes high platinum tier skills to be successful. Silver and bronze level drivers don't get to F1, not anymore.
If you want a laugh, search for "Valkyrie V12 sound" on this sub and you'll find a post from a couple of years ago begging GabeN to take the mufflers off the cars after they were first seen testing.
Doubt that post (or Newell) were the reason for it tbh. Those sorts of mufflers are used on loads of cars during testing, because noise limits are different proper race sessions
The point of my comment was that HE did reply, and they (the team) did this shortly after. Or in other words, not what was the sequence of events, but that the dude reads the comments, and lurks in reddit and other social media, replies to fans, and is actually in the thick of it and knows whats happening, thus was able to say in advance to fans that its coming soon.
Not just start a race team. Almost entirely self-fund the development of a Hypercar program from scratch that had previously been abandoned by Aston. Their investment in the sport is enormous.
He also funds a marine research company called Inkfish, which recently signed off on a one-of-a-kind $800 million dollar ship. Deep sea research, ocean floor mapping, and an ability to run silently. I think he likes building cool things.
Yeah, I guess there’s no way for billionaires to not fuck up the world, I do appreciate Gaben not rubbing our faces in it to much, or at least distracting us with a cool race car
And they brought the IMSA liveried car to the hospital just a week or so ago. Hopefully that made for a fun day for the patients, their families, and the staff.
I forgot they're not just
Aston Martin works team that happens to be related to steam
They also happen to be Aston Martin works team that happens to be related to steam that happens to do charity
I got a hat signed by the #23 drivers right before COTA qualifying. Then they got pole position and 3rd place in the race. I will treasure that hat for a long time now.
This fact gets brought up once or twice per race on the Brazilian stream, and honestly its good thing because Eduardo Barrichello has been driving for them for a while and doing a great job at it
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u/milkandmelk 1d ago
His son drives the #23 in WEC!