Lance Stroll’s Return to Home Soil - A Blessing or a Curse?
- therookiereporters
- Jun 30
- 3 min read
After missing Barcelona’s race due to injury and raring to come back for his home race in Montreal, will it help him, or will it make his injury worse? And could it make his injury more serious if he were to come back for his home race?
Lance Stroll had to pull out of the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona due to a recurring injury he sustained ahead of the 2023 season, due to a biking accident, which saw him require surgery on his wrist a few weeks before the 2023 season would officially go underway. While Lance would start the 2023 season and race extremely well, considering the pain he must have felt, it sounded like this pain had been going on for quite some time.
Although when a driver pulls out of a race, rumours swirl about what could have happened, often relying on fiction instead of the truth itself. Many news outlets suggested that an incident took place in the team garage after qualifying, which BBC Sport commented, “Is said by sources to have damaged equipment in the garage and sworn at team members after being eliminated at the end of the second qualifying session.”
But the main question that has to be asked is, could Lance Stroll be coming back too early? And if so, could he be more likely to injure it more and be detrimental to his career?
Lance would go and have surgery on his wrist, in hopes that something like this would not happen again, and to solve this issue once and for all. Although the chance looms that he may not be fit to see his home race between June 13th - June 15th. If Lance were not to make it to Canada, it would put Aston Martin in a sticky situation, with reserve drivers Felipe Drugovich and Stoffel Vandoorne racing in Le Mans, while Jak Crawford has not generated enough super licence points to race in Formula One.
Until June 11th, Aston Martin, along with F1, confirmed that Lance Stroll would be fit and ready to race in Canada; the Canadian was back to race on home soil. The concerning part? Just under 2 weeks of healing time, which is not a huge amount of time for a driver to recover from surgery. Although other drivers have come back racing after a few weeks after surgery, it's still a very tough thing to accomplish.
With the Canadian Grand Prix weekend coming to a close, it was a weekend to forget for Stroll, crashing his AMR25 in FP2, getting knocked out in Q1, which saw him start P18 (P17 after penalties and pitlane starts), then having a very poor race. With very little overtaking being done, along with collecting a penalty for forcing another driver off track. Although many people still think that this result could be due to his wrist, Stroll said that he felt good and was ready to be back on track for his home race.
Overall, as much as I admire Lance Stroll’s determination to make it back for Canada, and while I am over the moon he came back, I still think it's too early for him. He has a one-week break, then straight into a double header, Austria and Great Britain, which leaves Stroll with not much downtime to recover properly, which I think could be a curse in itself. Only time will tell what will happen in Austria and Great Britain.
Article written by Evelyn Gibson
