Lance Stroll said the decision to attempt the French Grand Prix on just one stop, taken at the end of the first lap, was probably too optimistic, with the Canadian being forced out of the race with five laps to go when his left front tyre failed at the end of the Mistral Straight.
The Williams Martini Racing driver was running well outside the points when the problem struck, running just ahead of team-mate Sergey Sirotkin who would go on to finish a lowly fifteenth, and despite the issue, Stroll was still classified seventeenth.
Stroll had first encountered a vibration with the tyre with around twenty laps to go, but he admitted they had to try something different to their rivals such is the pace deficiency at this point of the season, but ultimately running almost fifty laps was too much for the tyre.
“At the beginning the pace wasn’t too bad and I had a good start,” said Stroll, who has scored all of Williams four points in 2018 so far thanks to his eighth place finish in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. “With about 20 laps to go I felt a massive vibration on the car and it was just big wear on the front-left tyre.
“I had a flat spot on that tyre and then with [Stoffel] Vandoorne when he overtook me it was already so bad that I couldn’t turn right, as I had no support on the left tyre. Then with a few laps to go the vibration was so bad the tyre just blew and that was it.
“It was optimistic to go the whole race on one set of tyres, and I think we were the only ones trying to go the whole way. We tried to do something, but it just didn’t work. It was certainly not the race we were hoping for.”
