Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack said Lance Stroll’s clash with a team member will be discussed internally but not in the “heat of the moment”.
Following his fourth successive Q1 elimination last weekend, Stroll tossed his steering wheel aside when he returned to the garage, then appeared to push his trainer and fellow team member Henry Howe.
The driver downplayed the incident afterwards, saying “he’s a bro” and “we go through the frustrations together.”
However Krack said on Sunday in Qatar he will raise the matter with his driver at a suitable time.
“I think you have to speak about these things, but you have to put them in relation,” he said. “And I think you cannot speak in the heat of the moment.
“You need to wait, and maybe everybody sleeps one night, and then we have a look and we discuss and then the world is a different one.”
When Stroll’s frustrations boiled over in the garage last Friday, many criticised it as an excessive response to his early qualifying exit. Krack said it was not the most frustrated he has seen a driver, and suggested it was due to a series of setbacks rather than Stroll’s reaction to the situation in isolation.
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“You accumulate delivering below what you were or below your own expectations. And then that frustration comes over at one point,” Krack explained.
“You take a football player that is taken off the pitch, he doesn’t do a high-five to the co-manager or he throws the jersey away, throws the water bottles. We have seen that quite a lot.”
Krack said he tries to delay their post-session meetings as far as possible “to just try and get rid of the adrenaline” drivers experience while they are on-track.
“I’m sure we run maybe 10 to 20 times less adrenaline on the pit wall than the drivers do. But you put the microphone straight away in front of them, or you gauge every reaction that they do…
“I think emotion is what we want from sportsmen, and then if they react, we judge them quickly. You know, ‘is this right?’, ‘is this wrong?’. And I think we need to be careful with that.
“We want to see it, because then we have something to talk about. But then I think it goes one step too far. That then people sit down on the sofa or in an air conditioning room and say ‘this is too much’ or ‘you cannot do that’. I think we need to have a bit more respect for the drivers. And elite sportsman, I would say.”
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Stroll again failed to reach the second round of qualifying on Saturday. He finished 15th in the sprint race and 11th in the grand prix, missing out on his first point since July’s Belgian Grand Prix due to a track limits penalty.
However Krack drew some encouragement from Stroll’s performance on Sunday, despite the driver experiencing significant physical discomfort due to the punishing conditions, which he said left him close to passing out at one point.
“It was interesting that he was much more competitive,” said Krack. “He was actually quite happy with the car. I mean, from what I could hear now, happy being always relative, that is clear,” said Krack afterwards.”
The team is trying to get to the bottom of why Stroll is lagging so far behind Fernando Alonso at present, said Krack.
“We have to wait to understand why he was much, much closer in the beginning of the season and he is a little bit further away now – if it is related to how the car has changed over the season, and how it will develop for the next races.”
Krack said the Qatar weekend had been “a great learning exercise” for finding out what dictates Stroll’s competitivity compared to his team mate.
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After 17 rounds there is a gulf of six places and 136 points between Alonso and Stroll in the championship. The latter has suggested the development direction of the Aston Martin AMR23 has contributed to his recent loss of confidence in the car.
Krack reckons “we need to prove” if Stroll is correct in his assessment. “The fact is that he has lost a bit of competitivity, and this is something that we need to understand.
“We have suspicions, or indications, and this is I think what Lance is referring to. But then we need to make the according changes and see that if this is confirmed that if you improve that, he improves as well.”
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2023 Qatar Grand Prix
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