Alonso vs Stroll

In his eight seasons as a Formula 1 driver prior to this year, Lance Stroll has only ever out-scored a team mate once over a full campaign.

Fernando Alonso is a two-times world champion who has handled Stroll easily over the past two seasons, thumping him 206-74 in 2023 and 70-24 last year. So it’s fair to say Stroll out-scoring Alonso over the first half of the season was not widely expected.

But with half the season done, Stroll’s father Lawrence can thank him for bagging more than half of his team’s 36 points to date this year. How far does this situation reflect on the quality of Stroll’s driving – and Alonso’s?

No one would make the case that Stroll has suddenly got quicker. Not only has Alonso out-qualified him at every grand prix this season, but as of the last grand prix it has been a full calendar year since Stroll started ahead of Alonso on merit.

If anything the gap between the two drivers appears to have widened since the season began. His performance at the Circuit de Catalunya, where Alonso beat him by over half a second, reportedly led to an angry reaction by Stroll in the Aston Martin garage afterwards.

This was followed by a failure to appear at the mandatory post-session weighing, which the team blamed on a recurrence of the wrist pain which followed his crash over two years earlier. Stroll took no part in the rest of the weekend, while Alonso scored his first points of the season with ninth place.

Remarkably, it took Alonso until round nine to get any points on the board. He crashed out of the season-opener in tricky conditions and suffered brake failure at the next round, then finished 11th three times over the next five races. Aston Martin’s upgrade has clearly aided his cause, however, and since his breakthrough in Spain, Alonso has scored points every time.

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Stroll, meanwhile, has gathered almost all his points by making exquisitely-timed pit stops in wet conditions, then staying out of trouble. That delivered sixth place in Melbourne – which remains the team’s best finish so far this year – fifth in the Miami sprint race and seventh at Silverstone most recently, though it bears pointing out he ran as high as third at one stage, where Sauber’s Nico Hulkenberg eventually finished.

Alonso was running sixth when the rain hit at Silverstone and was far from impressed to fall behind his team mate by pitting for intermediates later. “Wow”, he reacted when told how Stroll got ahead of him, adding: “Crazy how you never get it right with me.” Stroll had been running out of the points, and the team indicated the opportunity to gamble with his strategy played a role in their thinking.

Given normal conditions, Alonso is surely on course to overhaul his team mate once more by the end of the year. But a few more rainy races may yet be sufficient to keep Stroll ahead.

Alonso vs Stroll: Summary

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Alonso vs Stroll: Race-by-race

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Alonso vs Stroll: One-lap pace

Unrepresentative comparisons omitted. Negative value: Alonso was faster; Positive value: Stroll was faster

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