Montreal, QC – After missing the Spanish Grand Prix due to a wrist injury related to a 2023 pre-season cycling accident, Lance Stroll got back into his Aston Martin F1 car on Friday, eager to race at home in the Canadian GP.
Stroll pulled out of the race in Spain after qualifying due to the pain in his right wrist becoming too intense to drive but, following an undisclosed procedure to fix the issue, he feels “pretty confident” that it “should be good” this weekend in Montreal.
“It was bothering me for a few weeks, in Imola and Monaco, and then Barcelona was just really brutal throughout the weekend,” he said. “It’s just the old injury that I had a couple years ago. Just started to bug me again…so just got it sorted.
“I don’t really want to get into detail about what I had to do and how I had to do it because it’s just my medical privacy, and I like to keep that confidential.”
In Montreal, Stroll will be looking to get back into the form he showed in the first two races of 2025, where he scored 14 of the team’s 16 points in Australia and China.
Since then, the Aston Martin squad struggled, with neither driver managing a top-10 finish until Stroll’s teammate, two-time world champion Fernando Alonso, took a ninth-place in Spain last time out.
The good news for Stroll lies in his past success at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, where he scored his first F1 points in 2017 with the Williams team, and where he always seems to find an extra gear, finishing in the top-10 in five of six races at home. His perfect points record at home got derailed in 2018 by Toro Rosso (now Racing Bulls) driver Brendan Harley, who crashed and collected Stroll as collateral damage.
But with the team lacking speed so far this year, Stroll tempered his expectations.
“It might be a little more difficult than last year; 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,” he said. “Being here in Montreal is always special. I just love coming back here, racing in front of the home crowd, and I’m looking forward to the weekend.”
That scenario of it being a bit more challenging seemed to play out in the two Friday practice sessions, where Stroll only managed 15th in the first, 1.010 seconds slower than Max Verstappen, who paced the session with a lap of 1 minute and 13.193 seconds. Williams drivers Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz rounded out the top-three in a session that was broken into two segments after Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc crashed in Turn 3 and brought out a red flag.
Then, Stroll’s second session ended after two laps when he went wide and hit the wall exiting Turn 7, destroying his car’s left-front suspension. He finished 19th and only ahead of Leclerc, whose car could not be repaired in time for the session. Mercedes driver George Russell topped the timesheets in second practice, putting up the fastest time overall on the day at 1 minute and 12.123 seconds, with Lando Norris of McLaren second, just 0.0028 seconds behind, followed by Russell’s teammate Kimi Antonelli at 0.288 seconds back.
The team announced on Thursday that Stroll would be back after the 26-year-old tested out the wrist in Europe to demonstrate that he could get back into the car.
“I got some laps in at Circuit Paul Ricard, in the south of France, before heading to Canada, so I’ve been back behind-the-wheel before the race weekend begins, which is really beneficial,” he said. “I felt good in the cockpit, so now my full focus is on this weekend.”
Stroll also addressed rumours that he re-injured his wrist after a blow-up in the garage following a poor qualifying in Spain.
“I was frustrated for sure — frustrated about my wrist and the last three races from Imola,” he said. “It was just inhibiting my driving, and I knew that Sunday was going to be tricky, probably impossible. And at that point, I was pretty frustrated about it.”
Canada also marks Aston Martin’s 100th Grand Prix since returning to F1 in 2021, and the 200th race for the Haas team, which joined the series in 2016.
Check back with InsideTrackNews.com for more coverage throughout the weekend.
