Lance Stroll’s run of Q1 eliminations continued at the Baku City Circuit, with the Canadian now having found himself on the wrong side of the cut off point in eight consecutive Grand Prix, and all four with his new team.
The Racing Point F1 Team racer missed out again on Q2, finishing sixteenth fastest in the opening segment of Qualifying for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, and he bemoaned the lack of running earlier in the weekend for his troubles on Saturday.
Stroll sat on the side-lines for first practice on Friday morning after the session-ending crash for George Russell and the subsequent investigation into the manhole covers, only for him to crash himself into the wall early in the second session, meaning he only really had Saturday morning’s session to get any significant running in ahead of Qualifying.
“It was a challenging day and it’s a shame to go out in Q1,” said Stroll. “I did what I could with the limited running we could do yesterday.
“FP3 was a good session and I kept building my confidence up, but in the end we didn’t have enough laps. I had to abort my first lap due to the yellow flags, so I only had one attempt. In the end, the lap just wasn’t good enough so all we can do is look ahead to tomorrow.”
Stroll knows that the past two races in Azerbaijan have been unpredictable, crashed-filled and safety car affected affairs, so he is not ruling out the possibility of a second top-ten finish of 2019 on Sunday, particularly with the pace that team-mate Sergio Pérez showed during Qualifying.
“The potential of the car is good, as Sergio has shown, and the race can be very unpredictable here,” said Stroll, who finished on the podium in Baku for Williams Racing back in 2017.
“If we come up with a good strategy and make the most of any opportunity we can still come up with a good result, so let’s see what happens.”
