Lance Stroll's leaked team radio perfectly sums up his disastrous season
Anyone scanning the lower reaches of the results this Formula 1 season will have seen Lance Stroll's name remarkably often, particularly among those who failed to finish. That makes a short clip of team radio from Sepang, never heard during the broadcast, all the more painful: it reveals more about the Canadian's state of mind than all this year's results put together.
Formula 1 returned to Malaysia last weekend for the first time since 2017, although the event ran under the Bahrain Grand Prix name because the war in Iran made racing at Sakhir impossible. For Aston Martin, the circuit near Kuala Lumpur was little more than a new setting for familiar suffering, with the team having spent the entire year running a Honda engine that Stroll himself says is woefully short of performance.
He had already made that clear to the assembled media before the weekend. "We're missing two seconds from the engine, so it's difficult. At places like Bakoe and Monza, there's not much you can do when you're missing two seconds from the engine," Stroll said.
An instruction Stroll ignored
During the race, Stroll spent a long time stuck behind the Haas of Esteban Ocon. His race engineer advised him to ease off through turn 12 to avoid needlessly draining the battery. Under the current regulations, energy management is almost as important as outright speed, making such requests among the most routine instructions of the season. Stroll, however, wanted none of it.
"No, I'm going flat out. F* this s*," said the Aston Martin driver.
He stubbornly kept his foot down and eventually crossed the line in twelfth, two places outside the points. It was also his best finish of the year, which says everything about the depths he and Aston Martin have sunk to. Fans were quick to interpret the outburst as a reaction to the entire season rather than that one moment behind Ocon. Yet the clip also revealed something often forgotten amid all the mockery of Stroll: he is far from resigned to life as a backmarker whose main aim each weekend is to stay out of trouble.
Retirements
The numbers behind that frustration speak for themselves. Alongside Valtteri Bottas and his Cadillac team-mate Sergio Pérez, Stroll is one of the only drivers yet to score a point in 2026, and even Yuki Tsunoda sits above him in the standings with just three races to his name. His retirement in Bakoe a week before Sepang was already his eleventh of the season, meaning he has failed to finish more often than he has reached the flag.
Only once this year has he managed to finish two consecutive races, when he was classified seventeenth in Miami and fifteenth in Montreal. His previous best result at the Hungaroring was followed by a run of four straight retirements, which only ended in Malaysia. The upgraded Honda engine introduced at Zandvoort brought little relief either: from then until Sepang, Aston Martin scored just two points while suffering five retirements across four race weekends.
Criticism of the Canadian has been fierce all year and intensified further when it was confirmed that he would remain alongside Fernando Alonso in 2027. The fact that his father Lawrence owns the team also makes him an easy target for anyone questioning his place in Formula 1. The preceding years were hardly outstanding either: he managed just 33 points in 2025, and only in 2023 did he finish in the top ten in the championship.
The next opportunity comes in Singapore this coming weekend. There, Stroll can try not only to improve on his best result of the year, but also to finish two consecutive Grands Prix for only the second time this season. Whether the frustration heard over the team radio in Sepang translates into points, however, depends at least as much on what Honda can extract from the engine behind him as it does on his own right foot.