Quali review: Woeful Lance

This will be a short post, straight to the point. How bad has Lance Stroll been during qualifying during this season? Let’s take a look at the numbers.

Average delta to safety (Q1)

I decided to analyze this data by only looking at Q1 data. Why only Q1 you may ask? Well, Lance is one out of 3 drivers who have not advanced to Q2 during this season, with the other 2 being George Russell and Robert Kubica.

The graph shows the average delta to “safety”, that means position #15 during Q1. Negative deltas show that drivers have been usually faster than the slowest driver that managed to qualify to Q2, and positive that they have been slower than the mentioned driver. Only 4 drivers have a positive delta to safety, with Grosjean actually having a negative delta in 3 out of the 4 quali sessions, but a terrible Q1 session in Azerbaijan skews his numbers.

The green/red numbers show how many times has a particular driver advanced to Q2. So far, besides the 2 Williams‘ drivers and Lance Stroll, every other driver has managed to advance at least 2 times to Q2 (Nico Hulkenberg and Antonio Giovinazzi). Lance has been on average 0.146 seconds away from position #15 in Q1, and as previously mentioned, has not managed to advance to Q2 during this season.

Delta to safety (Q1) per race

The next graph shows exactly how lance has been doing in all races so far during Q1. The plot shows the bottom 5 times, that as we know are eliminated from Q1, as well as Lance’s teammate, Checo Perez.

The closest Lance has managed to advance to Q2 was in Australia, when he qualified as 16th place and was half a tenth away from obtaining the desired 15th spot. What about the the farthest? Almost 2 and a half tenths in Bahrain, when he qualified as 18th place.

As we can see, Lance has been fairly close to 15th place, managing to get 16th place in 3 occasions. However, I am quite sure that this is not what Racing Point is expecting from him. “Fairly close” is something that at the end of the day means nothing in F1.

Just for the sake of comparison, I added Checo Perez’ data to the plot. While the RP19 has not been the fastest car in qualifying, Perez has managed to qualify 2 times to Q2 and 2 times to Q3, and has managed to stay consistently away from the elimination zone in Q1, placing 1 time in 11th, 2 times in 12th, and once in 13th place.

So far, the Mexican driver has outpaced Lance in Q1 by an average of 0.27 seconds, with the minimum time difference between both drivers being 0.108 seconds in Melbourne, and the maximum of 0.381 seconds in Azerbaijan.

Conclusion

Lance Stroll has not been good enough in quali during the current season. Nobody is expecting him to top the charts, but the RP19 seems to have enough speed to advance to Q2 and Q3 consistently, as proven by the quali results from Checo Perez.

While the Canadian is still young, he has over 2 years of experience in F1, and must deliver better results during the quali session. Sergio praised Lance’s race pace, but starting from the bottom of the grid certainly makes the race a lot harder for Stroll.

So far, the difference of 0.27 seconds between him and Sergio, combined with the fact that he has been the third worst driver in Q1, only beating both Williams’ drivers, is unacceptable for a driver of a capable racing car.

Hopefully you guys have enjoyed this article, please tell me what do you think in the comments below.