Lance Stroll ranked No 1 in F1 category as Aston Martin battle Mercedes

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Lance Stroll has been branded “the greatest pay driver of all time” despite struggling to match the standards of teammate Fernando Alonso this season. The Canadian started out in Formula One with Williams in 2017 and has three podiums and one pole position to his name so far, but has frequently been accused of having simply bought his way into the sport.

Stroll now races for Aston Martin, who came into existence after his billionaire father, Lawrence Stroll, rescued Force India from administration and rebranded the team in 2021.

This season double world champion Alsono has been leading the way for the Silverstone-based team, sitting third in the drivers’ championship with 139 points.

In contrast, Stroll is ninth in the standings and 94 points behind his experienced peer. There have been suggestions that team owner Lawrence, who is known to be hugely ambitious about turning the outfit into a title-challenging operation, could drop his own son in pursuit of a more advanced driver that can gather more points on a consistent basis.

But Peter Windsor has dismissed those claims and believes that anyone who thinks that Stroll’s drive at Aston Martin is under threat is not looking at the bigger picture.

Speaking on a live stream previewing the Hungarian GP on his own YouTube channel, Windsor said: “You could argue that Lance Stroll is the greatest pay driver of all time because, yes, he’s there because his dad is paying all the bills, but at least his dad has gone out and created a new team out of an old one, Aston Martin.

“The payment for Lance to be in Formula 1 has been a very constructive thing and it’s given a lot of jobs to a lot of people and it’s a whole new thing, so in that sense you’ve got to say: ‘Wow, that’s the perfect use of being a pay driver – and he’s got a reasonable amount of talent as well.’

“If you go through the grid, quite a lot of drivers at some point would have had to have begged and borrowed money to get to the next level of motor racing. And does that make them a paying driver?

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“Everybody who’s an Aston Martin fan should be very grateful that Lance Stroll is a Formula 1 driver because if he wasn’t his father wouldn’t have bought the team and it wouldn’t be Aston Martin.

“Without Stroll there would be no Aston Martin, so there’s no point even thinking: ‘They need a better driver than Stroll’ – anybody who thinks that doesn’t understand the genesis of the team.”

The Formula One circus rolls into Belgium this weekend for the 13th race of the season. Aston Martin will be hoping for a decent showing but with world champion Max Verstappen having won the last seven GPs, the race winner already feels like a formality.

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