Lance Stroll out of Brazilian Grand Prix on formation lap after humbling pre-race incident | F1 | Sport

Lance Stroll caused a delayed race start at the Brazilian Grand Prix with a spin during the formation lap. The Canadian racer initially kept his car out of the barriers but rolled into the gravel thereafter.

Stroll was unable to get his car out of the gravel, leaving race control with no option but to abort the start and allow a recovery vehicle to remove his AMR24 from the track.

This was the Canadian racer’s second incident of the day. After a promising start to qualifying, he found the barriers towards the end of Q2, eventually bringing out the red flag.

That crash had major implications for the World Championship with the ensuing red flag causing Max Verstappen to drop out in Q2. With a five-place grid penalty applied, he dropped to 17th on the grid.

Aston Martin’s pain continued though. Fernando Alonso was looking strong for an excellent qualifying result in Q3 but found the wall in the final sector, ruling him out of contention in the fight for pole.

The Aston Martin mechanics scrapped away to get both cars ready for the start of the race, but Stroll’s formation lap incident rendered some of that work pointless, bringing his Sunday to an unfortunate premature end.

Discussing his first crash of the day, Stroll said: “Just a very sudden… suddenly lost the car. I think I had [George] Russell in front of me, so maybe a bit of dirty air and then I just had a big slide. Conditions were tricky. Grip out there was very sketchy, so yeah, that was it.”

Alonso explained that the pair’s qualifying woes were, at least in part, due to the team’s lack of performance. “Yeah, I mean we are taking huge risk,” he explained. “We are the 10th fastest team in the dry and then we were P2 in Qualifying Two, so that shows the level of commitment we had.

“I think Lance and myself, unfortunately, we tried all or nothing. I was fighting for pole today and as I said, we’re the 10th fastest car so these things can happen.”