Lance Stroll admitted that Williams Martini Racing did not have the requisite pace for points at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
Stroll finished in thirteenth, one lap down on race victor Lewis Hamilton, in his final race for Williams before a widely-expected move to the Racing Point Force India F1 Team becomes official. Stroll is currently partaking in the official post-season tyre test at the Yas Marina Circuit for the team saved by a consortium led by his father, Lawerence, this summer.
Starting in twentieth, Stroll made his way through the field on super-soft tyres, the hardest slick compound brought to Abu Dhabi by Pirelli Motorsport. The Canadian eventually came into the pits for ultra-softs on lap 40 out of 55.
In a “challenging” race, neither Stroll nor team-mate Sergey Sirotkin managed to finish in the top ten to round off a very difficult season for the Grove team.
“I was very pleased with the start and the race in general and happy with my performance,” said Stroll. “But it was another one of those races where we just didn’t have enough pace to pick up points.
“It was challenging, but I thought for the package we had it was a good race and I am happy to have been fighting with the McLarens and to have finished in front of one of them.”
(Canadian Stroll said that the increasing wind speed adversely affected the car’s performance in his second stint, not allowing him to extract the performance from the purple-walled tyre.
“We went really long in the first stint,” he explained. “[That] was good, but the wind picked up a little bit in the second stint and really impacted the performance of the car on the ultra-soft tyre, so I went downhill from there.
“Now I shall recharge my batteries as it has been a long year.”
