The conspiracy theorists are already at work to explain Alonso bad performance in qualifs at Monaco ! Laughable ...
Lance gains two positions before the race takes place. https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/haas-f1-duo-disqualified-from-monaco-f1-qualifying-over-rear-wing-breach/10615682/
It is highly amusing to see the degree of straw clutching that’s now propagating off the back of 1 quali performance in Monaco. Hilarious! Look - Stroll just isn’t F1 material. No team outside of Aston wants him. It would also be fair to say that whilst he is pretty terrible, there are others who are equally bad. Sargent being an obvious example. That’s just the way F1 goes. Irritating though it is, the sport is not a meritocracy, and never has been.
Alonso finished P11 and Stroll P14. Stroll was leading Alonso by one position, then Alonso built a gap for Stroll so he could pit. Then as usual, Stroll self-inflicted a puncture on lap 50 and had to pit again and lost that gap that Alonso built and lost his lead against Alonso....could have been in the points.
Bad luck for Stroll today. After out qualifying and leading Alonso for most of the race he just brushed the barrier the wrong way while charging on new tires causing a puncture. Those who are quick to file this as an error by an under qualified driver should look at the number of other similar contacts that were gotten away with by others. Alonso himself had much more than a brush with the Armco that due to sheer luck did not damage the suspension or cause a puncture.
Bad luck? Clipping your rear tire there is a driver error. There are places you can touch the wall, and places you can't. That spot and rascasse, if you clip a rear tire, that's a big mistake. Most drivers contacted the same wall Alonso did, it's pretty much the norm now. "I hit the wall" was pretty much a scripted message to the pitwalls this weekend, yet very few resulted in damage. Never the less, Alonso did make a driver error by clipping the wall too much.
It is one thing to contact the barriers and break the suspension as that is a clear error that knocks you out of the race. Brushing the barriers will always come with the risk of a puncture but it is close to the barriers where time is found. Stroll was on fresh tires catching up ground so he was right to make the most of the track. A touch that causes a puncture is a calculated gamble that in his case did not pay off. I'm pretty certain that almost every driver had a similar contact at some time during the race and it would be wrong to say that ALL of those drivers made mistake. In a similar vein the tap between Piastri and Sainz that caused the latter's puncture was just plain bad luck. Most of the time you would have gotten away with it and I would not accuse either driver as having made a mistake. Some people however just can't help turn anything into fuel for their fire.
Did you even see Strolls post race interview? Not once did he say I apologized to Alonso for giving me the gap to pit(his 2nd one) and not once did he showed that he himself messed up the whole race by getting a puncture for his 3rd pit stop. His demeanor in the interview was like "Oh well, it happens and that's the end of it" (with a smile on his face like he doesn't give a crap). Stroll is the only driver in the whole grid that raced on the track to make 3 pit stops.
Looking forward to the next race: Stroll's home Grand Prix Last time I was there, they named an entire grandstand after him.
It’s as much his home as Monaco is mine. Maybe he had a stand named after him but the whole circuit is named after a real local F1 star, maybe you heard of him: Gilles Villeneuve! Stroll is a relative unknown even in his own home town—wonder why?—and there’s no buzz around him whatsoever. There’s probably a bigger following for Zhou than for Stroll.
Still OT, but I think he can do it. As I heard G. Villeneuve’s ex-F. Atlantic teammate and driving school instructor/ driving coach for Player’s CART team R. Spenard explain to a Ferrari Challenge driver many years ago, the trick to going fast at Montreal is to have a good exit out of the chicanes while still carrying a lot of speed into the chicanes—in other words, attack the curbs of the chicane without using the car. I think the Ferrari is very good at this. If they can get this while maintaining good Vmax on the straight, they’ll do well. Not to mention the fan support which we’ll be predominantly for Charles.
Well, there are certain barriers that these drivers purposely touch and at times graze the barriers with their tires here at Monaco. I have seen it countless times with current drivers and drivers of the past as well. Sometimes they tear off the sponsored banners on the barriers. Stroll is just accident prone and most of his career, it's self-inflicted when these "accidents" happen.
