Pundit claims Stroll's 'bad reputation' based on one major factor

Sky Sports F1 pundit Bernie Collins has claimed that Lance Strolls negative reputation is solely attributed to the fact that his father owns Aston Martin.

Lawrence Stroll spearheaded a consortium's acquisition of the Force India F1 team in August 2018. The team was subsequently rebranded as Racing Point in 2019, with his son, Stroll, securing a seat.

Lawrence Stroll assumed the role of the executive chairman of Aston Martin car company and in 2021, he further rebranded the F1 team as Aston Martin.

His son has come in for some heavy criticism in 2023, finishing 132 points behind his team-mate Fernando Alonso, with the F1 veteran consistently outperforming him in the majority of race weekends.

'Stroll has to work harder than most'

However, former Aston Martin strategy engineer, Collins, believes that Stroll's negative reputation is intensified by the fact that his father owns the team, but recognised he hadn’t performed as good as his team-mates.

“I think Lance gets a bad rep for you know his father owning the team,” said Collins on the Beyond The Grid podcast. “And I think it’s very hard to remove that aspect when judging his performance. This year his performances have been poor, I don’t think you can argue that particularly since the car’s got worse.

“I think Checo in Force India was underrated, so when Lance wasn’t beating Checo he was underrated even more which is why there has been this drive to bring in Vettel, and now Alonso, drivers that are highly rated to get some close results.

“And I will be interested to see – I don’t think we’ve had an accurate view on him versus Alonso because of what’s happened throughout the year, he does have to work at it more than, you know, the likes of Alonso.”

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