'Above all, Lawrence Stroll is a loving dad': why Aston owner missed team's first F1 podium

I walked into our paddock unit, mounted the stairs, and knocked on Lawrence’s office door. His head was in his hands. Perhaps he had been crying. Maybe he still was. I explained the reason for my interruption. “OK,” he said.

I duly drafted some words, I WhatsApped them to him, and he made a few small changes. We then issued the following statement, which was run among other tributes from a series of F1 luminaries in a number of published obituaries: “Today is an extremely sad day, for Mansour was not only a great man but also a true friend. He never courted the F1 limelight, but his contribution to the sport over the past 37 years has been truly immense. On behalf of myself, my family, and the Aston Martin F1 Team, I extend my deepest sympathy to Mansour’s loving wife Kathy, his children, his entire family, and his many friends, among whom I have been privileged to be able to count myself as one. May he rest in peace.”

As I sat down to watch the race in my office in our paddock unit, alongside my comms/PR colleagues, I was hoping for a peaceful couple of hours. It started quietly, without much in the way of position change. We had decided to stop late in Vettel’s case and very late in Stroll’s, hoping to optimise the overcut (for Vettel) and try to find a way to turn a back-row starting position into something more positive (for Stroll). As a result, Seb briefly took the lead, although he was out of sync in terms of pitstops. Nonetheless, he emerged from his stop in sixth place, on fresher rubber than his immediate competitors, so we were becoming reasonably confident that a points-earning position might be within his grasp.

Then, on lap 30, Stroll, who had still not pit-stopped, suffered a left-rear tyre failure at Turn 20, causing him to hit the wall hard for the second time in 24 hours. As ever when one of your drivers has a big shunt, you wait to hear him say something on the radio, and, when you hear it, it comes as a huge relief. “Wo, wo, wo, wo, wo, puncture,” was what Lance said, and those few sounds/words made it clear that, although he might be shaken up, he was both conscious and lucid.

The safety car was deployed, staying out for four laps, and, once we had made sure that Lance was OK, the track had been cleared, and the race had resumed, we could refocus on Vettel, who had passed pole man Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari at the restart and was now running in fifth place. A lap later he passed Pierre Gasly’s AlphaTauri for fourth. Hey, what was going on here? Did we have a chance of a podium, which would be Aston Martin’s very first in F1?

We did indeed – because 13 laps later the race leader, Max Verstappen, also suffered a tyre failure, also to his left-rear, just as Stroll had done, as a result of which his Red Bull slammed into the wall on the main straight. Again, thank god, he was OK, and again the safety car was deployed. Ostensibly keen to prioritise driver safety for all – but also transparently anxious that his other driver, Checo Perez, who was now leading, would not also suffer a race-ruining tyre failure – Red Bull’s sporting director Jonathan Wheatley then said the following words to the FIA’s race director, Michael Masi, broadcast on the world TV feed: “Please consider a red flag [and a race restart] so as to give everybody an opportunity to change tyres.”

That Masi did – despite having decreed that a safety car would suffice in the case of Stroll’s very similar accident – and, after a 34-minute delay, the race was restarted, with 49 of the 51 laps completed. Perez led, Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton was second, and Vettel was third. Checo made a slow start, which encouraged Lewis to have a lunge at him up the inside of Turn 1. But Hamilton had made a rare mistake, selecting an incorrect retardation mode, which meant that he outbraked himself and went straight on down the Turn 1 escape road. Seb was second. Could he win? Was it possible?

He tried his best, and he stayed as close to Perez as he could, but ultimately the Red Bull was too strong, and Checo duly took his first F1 grand prix win for the Milton Keynes team, 1.385sec ahead of Seb’s Aston Martin.

We were nonetheless overjoyed – but, even so, we were mindful not to be too exuberant around Lawrence, since he had learned of the death of a good friend in the morning and had seen his son suffer a big shunt in the afternoon, just a day after he had survived another shunt almost as heavy. Nonetheless, as my colleagues and I ran through our garage and down the pitlane, ready to position ourselves beneath the podium so as to cheer Seb as he sprayed the bubbly, I passed Lawrence and Otmar Szafnauer, our team principal, who were conferring beside our pitwall. “Are you coming to the podium?” I shouted. Szafnauer gave me the thumbs-up.

I next saw Otmar about an hour later, as I was arranging his post-race media interviews. “You know when you ran past Lawrence and me and asked us if we were going to the podium?” he began.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Well, Lawrence then turned to me and said, ‘What did Bishop say? Podium? Where did Seb finish?’”

You have to remember that, multi-billionaire business magnate and F1 grandee though he is, Lawrence Stroll is above all a loving dad. After Lance’s lap-30 shunt he had stopped watching the race. I do not blame him. Safety is everything in motor sport, and we should never forget how fortunate we are that impacts as heavy as those suffered by Stroll, Giovinazzi, and Verstappen in Baku in 2021, and many others since, would have seriously injured (or worse) the drivers of yesteryear who were racing far flimsier machines.

I have recently been reading about the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl (yes, I enjoy a hinterland of interests outside F1). He once said: “Progress is man’s ability to complicate simplicity.” In F1, progress works the other way around: it simplifies complication, and it saves lives that way, so let’s hear it for F1 progress.