Lance Stroll believes race strategy cost him a championship point in the 2019 Chinese Grand Prix as the Canadian came home twelfth.
Stroll had been eliminated in the first session of qualifying for the seventh race in a row and started the race sixteenth. Reasonable race pace however, saw Stroll enter the fight for tenth in the latter stages of the race. But failure to be “more proactive” saw Stroll lose out to Alexander Albon and Romain Grosjean.
“Today could have been better,” said Stroll. “We were in front of Albon before the first stop and then he undercut us by one lap and finished in the points, so it’s a bit of a shame.
“We could have been more proactive, because we didn’t have anyone immediately in front of us. I think it was Sergio or Raikkonen ahead at the time, about five seconds up the road, so we weren’t really fighting anyone in front and we had Albon three seconds behind.
“It was just a classic undercut. It’s disappointing, because once that happened we were in his dirty air and it was tough to overtake. We tried an extra stop at the end and got past Magnussen to finish P12, but it could have been more.
“Our race pace was not bad but we just need to look at the strategy, because I think we may have been able to pick up a point today.”
