Stroll’s short-lived struggle until he hit the wall · RaceFans

After a solid start to his season in Bahrain, Lance Stroll endured a Saudi Arabian Grand Prix which was as tough as it was brief.

The Aston Martin driver visibly struggled for grip in the opening laps of the race, rapidly lost touch with the cars ahead, then crashed at the same corner he’d hit the wall two days earlier.

In an extremely close qualifying session, Stroll secured a place in the top 10 with team mate Fernando Alonso. However for the second weekend running he failed to improve on his Q1 time in subsequent sessions. He lined up in 10th place, six places off his team mate and seven-tenths of a second slower.

“I think we might have had some issues in Q3,” he said afterwards. “We need to investigate it.

“The car felt a bit tricky and then I lost some time in the final sector – which is basically just straights – on my last Q3 lap. We need to look into why we weren’t able to go any quicker after Q1 – we were much better at the start of qualifying than at the end.”

Both Aston Martins took the start on the medium tyre compound. But their races diverged almost immediately.

Alonso, has he predicted, found it hard to keep his AMR23 among the front-runners. Oscar Piastri picked him off with ease.

But Stroll was having an tougher time: So much so he was slower than Alonso even on the lap his team mate was overtaken. He complained to race engineer Ben Michell about his power unit “de-rating” – running out of electrical energy on the straights. This was likely caused by him using the maximum available power for too long as his scrapped for positions in the midfield at the start:

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However Stroll’s greater problem…