Lance Stroll, Aston Martin, Silverstone, 2021

Stroll: Aston Martin’s progress a credit to father’s “incredible vision”

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In the round-up: Lance Stroll praises the job his father Lawrence Stroll has done in reviving the former Racing Point team, which will race as Aston Martin this year.

What they say

Pictures: New Aston Martin AMR21 runs at Silverstone
Stroll said the progress Aston Martin made last year, when it was known as Racing Point, was a credit to the “incredible vision” of his father Lawrence Stroll, owner of the team and car manufacturer:

I don’t know how people perceive it but all I can say is from everything I’ve seen first-hand over the last two years, it’s unbelievable what he’s done and how he’s put this project together with Aston Martin and how this team has transformed over the last two years. It’s so incredible. He’s just got an incredible vision and he’s had that incredible vision since day one with this team.

Already from one year to the next like looking at 2019 the last year, we went from a team that was – if I just give an example – in Hungary, qualified 17th and 18th in 2019, and in 2020 we qualified third and fourth and improved 3.1 seconds, I believe that was, in terms of lap time, of course with condition changes. But just put that into perspective for a second and give that some thought. That’s down to the incredible job that my dad’s done.

He’s given the tools to the incredibly talented people at the factory and everyone that works in his team that’s been doing such a great job for so many years punching above their weight. Now we can really just move forward and there’s so much exciting times ahead of us. So a big ‘hat’s off’ to Lawrence, it’s amazing.

Quotes: Dieter Rencken

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Comment of the day

Is Gene Haas selling his team to Nikita Mazepin’s father Dmitry?

My gut feeling is that Mazepin already has bought the team or has an agreement to buy the team. We saw that the F1 organisations income was more or less halved du to the Coronavirus lockdowns where F1 had to pay track owners for staging races instead of receiving the fee the organizers usually pay.

This means half the income or even less for the teams this year and probably next year as well. This was the nail in the coffin for Williams and probably for Haas as well.
Sven

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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31 comments on “Stroll: Aston Martin’s progress a credit to father’s “incredible vision””

  1. someone or something
    7th March 2021, 0:37

    Aston Martin’s “progress” so far: Springing into existence as a result of its second renaming in as many years.
    Oh, they mean last year? The one where they “reverse engineered” a virtually perfect copy of Mercedes’ car by taking “pictures” of it, and when other teams started asking nosy questions, Mercedes got angry at them, and not the team that”reverse engineered” their intellectual property almost to perfection? Yeeeah, not shady at all, just the kind of “progress” everyone should be aiming for …

    Can we just have one day of those frauds not making the headlines?

    1. WEll, I think they did make progress.

      But it’s not a big wonder why: Stroll Sr. was able/willing to invest money into it (and yes, tying that up with buying AM does show his way of thinking which has brought him success/wealth).

    2. That was a bit OTT from Stroll Jr., but credit where it’s due. Copying Mercedes is borderline unsporting, but one can’t deny it worked, and will continue to work. Especially as designers and engineers can learn first hand what really works and not. But equally getting Mercedes gearbox and rear end etc is quite a scoop.

      Of course the team was already from Force India punching above its weight, but now as Aston Martin 3rd fastest car and challenging Red Bull for second is really incredible. There’s no other word for it. Stroll Sr. has great vision and can cut through to the essentials. Even getting Vettel I bet will prove to be a great decision.

      1. someone or something
        7th March 2021, 14:39

        Copying Mercedes is borderline unsporting, but one can’t deny it worked, and will continue to work. Especially as designers and engineers can learn first hand what really works and not. But equally getting Mercedes gearbox and rear end etc is quite a scoop.

        But that’s basically my point: Every single aspect of this reeks. What’s easier to believe? That they nailed taking pictures of and rebuilding another car to uncanny perfection, while other teams have been trying the same thing, and repeatedly failed to get it to work? That their car ran flawlessly from day 1 in testing, despite being a completely alien car, which they imitated and had to make tons of assumptions about? That Mercedes joined them in their PR battle against other teams for the sole reason that they were in such deep respect of their copying skills that getting the FIA to rule that there was indeed foul play (before the FIA started urging the other teams to protest Racin Point at every race, which again was weird …) was just unethical?

        Or is the explanation possibly much simpler? What if Lawrence Stroll just paid Mercedes a nice sum for their 2019 car’s blueprints (or large portions thereof), to the benefit of both teams? Mercedes would’ve made extra money while finding a way to make life harder for their independent rivals, but not for themselves (seeing as it was almost guaranteed that Mercedes’ new car would be more competitive), and Racing India Stroll Martin would’ve found THE most straightforard way of converting money into performance: buying a superior car. This would explain everything. Why Mercedes unleashed PR flak on the teams that protested the many-named team (because they did not want to end up being investigated themselves), why FI/RP/AM never experienced teething problems despite ostensibly working exclusively with pictures. Why their campaign took almost half the season to start yielding impressive results not only in qualifying, but in the races as well (because building a car from another team’s blueprint does not equal knowing how to extract the best performance from it).
        In short: The only credit that was due was probably a bunch of split up strawman transactions sometime in early-mid 2019.

        but now as Aston Martin 3rd fastest car and challenging Red Bull for second is really incredible.

        Erm, what? In terms of PR barrage, okay. But I fail to see when and where Racing Point (much less Aston Martin) really challenged Red Bull. I mean, Verstappen alone scored more points in his 12 race finishes than Pérez and Stroll combined.

        1. To play devil’s advocate, would it necessarily be all that alien to the team though? After all, a significant portion of the components on the car would be sourced directly from Mercedes – not just the power unit, but the transmission system, electrical components and so forth.

          As Force India, the team have also had a long standing technical partnership with Mercedes – the roots of it started in 2009, when they partnered with McLaren and Mercedes, and since 2013 that has been an exclusive technical partnership with Mercedes. That has included joint research initiatives over the years, so Force India, and later Racing Point, would have a greater degree of technical insight into the workings of Mercedes than, say, Williams (especially with the latter deliberately staying at arms length for a long time).

        2. you’re assuming here though that the racing point engineers are incompetent. Any assumptions they needed to make would have been using their combined engineering know how. I’m not saying its how it happened, nor am I saying its ok, I’m just saying its a possibility without discrediting the racing point engineers/designers and their ability, whether they had Mercedes help or not, they would have had to alter certain aspects of it anyway, whether on their own merit or not, in order to make it not a photocopy of mercedes, but just different enough not to be a photocopy.

    3. OOOOoooooooh salty much. Best of luck to them I say.

      1. It’s nothing to do with people being salty at their success. It’s everything to do with fans fearing for the integrity of the constructors championship remaining as such; a championship for constructors.

        Customer cars and related debates have been going on for years. Don’t try to belittle those fears by passing them off as people being envious of their success.

  2. Seen some rumours around the inter-web about Binnoto being fired. Wonder if there’s any truth to it.

    Hopefully @dieterrencken has a scoop for us!

    Will it be a total surprise if he gets the sack? Far from it? I guess in his defence, you could possibly argue that he hasn’t been given enough time. I’m no fan of his, but there appears to be some sort of plan forming in the background…another year to see how it plays out may be a more reasonable shout.

    Who would replace him? I think the structure of the team needs to be examined first. If Binnoto goes, I’d hope Ferrari hire an external candidate. They have become too insular.

    1. @jaymenon10 Do you have a link? But no, Binotto going wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest, it’s almost as traditional for Ferrari as the red paint.

        1. Many things, but surprised I was not.

        2. @jerejj
          Thanks mate for the source. On another note, I have some reservations about that particular blog. I don’t know if he is reporting or leaking the rumour. If it is the latter, I think for me it’s better to wait for more credible sources.

          1. @tifoso1989 I’ve seen a similar mention about TJ13 once or twice before, although I don’t think that user is necessarily any less credible than others. Pretty much every site reports and posts the same things. I mainly use Racefans.net and Motorsport.com for F1-related news, but to a lesser extent, others as well, one of those being TJ13.

    2. Kral has now removed the video in question and clarified that his comments were merely his own opinion, and that he did not have any insider knowledge of the situation at the F1 team.

      “Just to make it loud and clear … some of my recent comments about Scuderia Ferrari have been misinterpreted and taken out of context,” he said in a hurried follow-up post on social media network Twitter.

      “What I said was based on my own opinion and without any real base or information,” he added. “I apologise if these speculations have created any issue.”

      I didn’t see it in my feed, but saw a couple of articles about the redaction. Seems there’s nothing to it.

      1. Interesting almost exact the same reply as Salo did with his Ferrari Fuel story…

    3. The point is that outlets who ran the story did not contact Ferrari – we did and it was a non-story and hence we didn’t waste time on thereafter. The funny thing is I didn’t see Kral’s apology published by them. Apologies are less sensational than bull…

      Binotto was v much in evidence today.

  3. AM press releases are so cringeworthy I can’t even read the synopsis.

  4. The grid would be looking dire without the commitment of Mateschitz and Stroll with what are essentially vanity projects.

    Mateschitz doesn’t have to run two teams he could just be the major sponsor of two teams, Stroll could just buy his son a seat rather than buy a team.

    1. True.. so there is use for these men after all. Who would have thought!

  5. Honestly, I’d prefer to have a chat with Lawrence than Dmitry.

  6. Red Bull and Williams announce new partnerships (F1 Technical)
    “Williams and Acronis started their partnership back in 2018 and the Grove-based outfit has since benefited from Acronis Cyber Protect. This unique AI-enhanced solution integrates data protection with cybersecurity, preventing cyberattacks and helping the team avoid downtime, data loss, and security breaches.”

    Reading this less cynically, I guess it was Acronis who warned them that the app was hacked.

  7. Graham (@guitargraham)
    7th March 2021, 9:42

    New car, caviar, four star daydream, Think I’ll buy me a formula one team

  8. Stroll has 16-16 vision. Not incredible that the merc is up to 3.1s quicker than your old car. Haas admits it, I got more respect for steiner.

  9. While I do applaud the exciting investment Stroll and his group have made and are continuing to make, and would expect to hear nothing less from Lance about that, and I think it is so great for F1 overall, at the same time I think as many do they need to also check off the box of making their own car. For me tracing the winner’s car, while legal (not quite fully legal last year) is not the way to go and will guarantee them to never win the titles against the OEMs, in this case Mercedes F1 team.

    It remains to me a question as to what they will do for next year when they won’t have a new style car to copy. Will they legally be able to get help/plans from Mercedes to some degree? Or will they (for me hopefully) have to go it on their own for next year, with obviously only the necessary data that any customer must be provided in order to know ahead of time how they will be fitting the pu into the car, and this design the car appropriately?

    I hope to hear from them that they look forward to taking on the challenge of becoming independent of Mercedes for chassis design and build for the new generation starting next year, and will only accept the minimum data any other customer gets, for to me that is the only path to truly becoming a top team. Of course that also sets aside the reality that even customers of another’s pu are still on their hind foot against factory works teams, and that should be AM’s ultimate goal…full works operation…their own pu and chassis married under one roof.

    1. Sumedh Lol indeed.

  10. Lance loves his dad (‘s money). Slow news day!

  11. Oh yes, Lance hat talent and his dad has vision.
    Talent was an ancient unit of value, about 30 kilogram of silver. I have not yet discovered the monetary origins of ‘vision’, but I’m sure now there must be one.

  12. a credit to father’s incredible Money

  13. Surprised, didn’t remember force india was that bad in 2019, I followed the season but I guess I was too fixated on the front runners, otherwise they normally haven’t been that bad on a season.

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