Lance Stroll is gaining a reputation for fighting through pain.
The lone Canadian driver in Formula One will race for Aston Martin at this weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix, two weeks after missing the Spanish GP and undergoing surgery on his right wrist.
“It gives me a lot of confidence that I’ve done it before, and I was in much worse shape,” he said. “I had both wrists that were broken, one was not fixated. My toe was broken. I was in a lot more pain.”
Citing medical privacy, the 26-year-old from Montreal wouldn’t disclose much about his most recent injury during a defensive press conference Thursday at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, but later revealed some details to a small group of local reporters.
“This was much more simple just to get it sorted. It’s not like a whole broken bone again,” he said with his right wrist wrapped in a bandage at the Aston Martin hospitality. “It was just fixing what was already aggravating me.”
Reserve drivers Felipe Drugovich and Stoffel Vandoorne were considered as possible fill-ins if Stroll wasn’t fit, but Aston Martin chief executive officer and team principal Andy Cowell said the team never expected to use its Plan B.
“Plan A’s been strong all the way through, and Lance is here,” he said. “He was the most upset that he wasn’t driving Sunday in Barcelona, and has been the most determined person in the whole team to make sure that he’s here this weekend.”
Stroll took part in practice sessions and qualifying in Barcelona before pulling out of the race late, leaving Aston Martin without a second driver.
If the operation was only a simple procedure, why didn’t he do it sooner?
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Stroll explained that his wrist began acting up at the beginning of last month’s European triple-header — the Emilia Romagna GP, Monaco GP and the Spanish GP — and he tried to power through without having to miss a race.
The Canadian had already planned to have the procedure following the Barcelona race, he added.
“It tends to be a thing with these screws and stuff,” he said. “You could go a couple years and it can be OK, and sometimes you just leave it in for life and sometimes it starts to bother you, and then it becomes — it starts to bother you very quickly.
“(That’s) what happened at the beginning of the weekend in Imola (Emilia Romagna), and then it was just pain tolerance, until, hopefully in my mind, the end of the triple header.”
Stroll, who ranks 12th in the 20-driver grid through nine of 24 races, struggled to back-to-back 15th-place finishes in Imola and Monaco.
Then his pain reached a tipping point in Spain.
“Got to the point in Barcelona where I was already struggling in (the second free practice), I had to get out of the car and miss 20 minutes at the end of FP2 to try and save energy for the race,” he said. “Then I was just grinding through Saturday, and I was not at my peak form at all.
“Not a fun couple weeks, but feeling better now.”
The BBC reported that Stroll lost his temper in the team’s garage, damaging equipment and swearing at team members after being eliminated in the second qualifying session.
The team has denied that the outburst caused his injury.
“I was frustrated, for sure,” Stroll acknowledged. “Frustrated about my wrist and the last three races from Imola. It was just inhibiting my driving. So I knew that Sunday was going to be tricky, probably impossible. And at that point, I was pretty frustrated about it.”
Cowell said he respected the fact that Stroll, as an ultracompetitive athlete, tried to drive through race weekend despite his ailment.
“They want to be in the race. They want to see the five red lights go out and have the experience of a 310-kilometre race,” he said. “I have got huge admiration for all the drivers and that competitive spirit.
“But when for medical reasons things get too much, then you’ve got to stop.”
Stroll, whose father, Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, owns Aston Martin’s F1 team, has often performed well at home.
He finished a career-best seventh in Montreal last year and has made the top 10 five of six times.
Aston Martin, however, has struggled this season. The British outfit is tied for second-last in the constructors’ championship with 16 points.
“It might be a little more difficult than last year,” Stroll said. “We had good straight line speed and that gave us an advantage in Montreal. This year, we have a little less, but historically our team is strong here since 2019.”
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