Amid Aston Martin turnaround, pressure mounting on Stroll

Aston Martin is in danger of facing a problem that Ferrari knows all too well.

In 2022, the two wins in the opening three races for Charles Leclerc — coupled with his second place in Jeddah — had him leading the championship comfortably and expectations were raised enormously.

By mid-season, any title hopes had all but gone, and by the end of the campaign second pace in the constructors’ championship was deemed reason enough to replace Mattia Binotto with Fred Vasseur as team principal. Yet the final standings showed a clear step forward from one season to the next, and overall progress.

Aston Martin is in the same position, having started the year as Red Bull’s closest challenger and with Fernando Alonso in typically metronomic form, scoring six podiums in the first eight races. But much like Ferrari last year, that strong start has been slowly erased by improvements from rival teams that have seen Aston slip to fourth in the constructors’ standings and with McLaren closing in.

That the gap to McLaren is still 78 points shouldn’t be overlooked — a sign of how far apart the two teams were early on — but it’s hard to shake the feeling of momentum and the fact that Andrea Stella’s team has closed in by 59 points in the seven races since introducing a major update in Austria is pretty remarkable.

If the pair end the season closely matched on points, it means they had similar results, but just because one has scored them later in the year than the other, the impression of each team is very different.

And the same could be said about one of the drivers, following Lance Stroll’s huge accident in qualifying in Singapore.

Stroll sat out Sunday’s race on account of feeling sore after the big impact at the final corner in Q1, a crash that had multiple triggers. Logan Sargeant’s impeding earlier in the session meant Stroll needed a final lap to try and get through, and the traffic chaos at the end of the session left him starting his crucial attempt within two seconds of Pierre Gasly ahead.

From there, an improvement was always going to be tough, but in a last-ditch Hail Mary he tried to carry too much speed in the final sector and the outcome was almost inevitable.

That withdrawal was the first time Stroll had missed a race since 2020, despite the pre-season injuries he sustained in a cycling crash just a few weeks before the Bahrain Grand Prix. Two fractured wrists and a fractured toe didn’t stop Stroll driving through the pain barrier to race and score points, the Canadian later saying he knew what a good car the team had and he wanted to use it.

Singapore was already looking like a tough weekend before that crash, and then starting at the back feeling less than 100% on a track that is so tough to overtake on was unlikely to yield much of a return. But Stroll was not present at all on Sunday, not even to personally thank his mechanics for the huge effort overnight to get the car into a position where it…