Lance Stroll may be the most secure driver on the Formula 1 grid, but he won’t be the one Aston Martin rely on to win a title in an Adrian Newey car.

That’s according to respected BBC journalist Andrew Benson.

Does a World title await Lance Stroll?

Although Stroll has spent eight years on the Formula 1 grid, six of those have been with the team owned by his father Lawrence who bought Force India before rebranding it Aston Martin.

Under his leadership, Aston Martin has grown in stature as a team with a state-of-the-art facility, a new wind tunnel and more recently the signing of acclaimed F1 design Newey.

All the signs point to a team wanting championship success, although questions remain about Stroll.

While Aston Martin have fielded the likes of four-time World Champion Sebastian Vettel and double World Champion Fernando Alonso, the team’s second seat belongs to Lance Stroll. And as long as he wants it, it’s his.

Although he hasn’t matched the results of this team-mate and currently sits on 24 points to Alonso’s 62, a battle he lost by 74 points to 206 last year, there’s no talk of Stroll’s race seat being under threat.

Last time out in Brazil his season hit a new low as he beached his AMR24 after going off on the formation lap and then trying to drive through a sodden gravel trap.

While his former karting rival Jarno Opmeer declared Stroll was “not someone you’d expect” in F1, Ziggo Sports’s Olav Mol blasted the Canadian for having the same “intelligence as a dead dinosaur egg”.

F1 2024: Team-mate head-to-head stats

👉F1 2024: Head-to-head qualifying record between team-mates

👉F1 2024: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

It begs the question, how long can Stroll continue at Aston Martin while not performing?

Benson reckons the answer to that is as long as Stroll wants, even if he isn’t the team’s champion elect.

“Aston Martin owner Lawrence Stroll has never quite said it in as many words, but people who know him well and have worked for him believe he bought an F1 team for his son, and his big ambition is for Lance to become World Champion,” he said in a BBC Q&A.

“So Lance will be in the car as long as he wants to be an F1 driver. And the big question surrounding the team is what happens to it if there ever comes a point when he does not want to continue? Will Lawrence want to continue as an owner if Lance is no longer a driver?

“Lawrence Stroll has masterminded a series of developments at Aston Martin that underline his ambition for the team to become title contenders.

“The latest is the signing of Adrian Newey, F1’s most celebrated design engineer, who will start work in March 2025. Newey follows a major recruitment programme, as well as the building of a new factory and wind tunnel.

“Lance Stroll clearly has talent – he put a Racing Point on pole in the wet in Turkey in 2020, for example, and shows well from time to time. But he is yet to prove he can put in this sort of performance other than very occasionally.

“On a general level, Stroll has been slower than every team-mate he has had in F1, other than Sergey Sirotkin in 2018.

“So, given that a team needs to have two cars, it’s hard to see how Stroll can ever be World Champion, as one would imagine that whichever leading driver Aston Martin sign alongside him in the future will be quicker.

“The main seat is occupied until the end of 2026 by Fernando Alonso. He will be 45 by the time his contract runs out, and has not said whether he wants to continue beyond that time.

“If Alonso leaves, or the team decide to sign someone else, he is likely to be replaced by another leading driver, who would again be expected to beat Stroll on the basis of the evidence so far.

“As for whether seats should be decided on talent alone, it has always been the case in F1 that there is the odd driver who owes his seat at least partly to the funding he brings with him. It’s an expensive sport.

“Stroll owns the team. People might not like it, but it’s his prerogative who he puts in the car.”

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