Walk: In general, our car lacks efficiency

Lance Stroll was often criticized this year, and with good reason, but it seems he improved at the end of the season: in Sao Paulo and Las Vegas, the Aston Martin driver finished in the top five and took 7th place in Austin. In Abu Dhabi he emphasized that racing has really been a pleasure for him lately, although he admits that the AMR23 car remains weak.

Lance Stroll: “I’m in a good mood because we had good performances, including the race in Las Vegas, which was fun and we earned a lot of points in the last few rounds. The car made a good impression, because we have certainly made progress with the AMR23 in recent months. We began to better understand the peculiarities of its behavior on the track, although before that we probably did not fully understand some aspects.

Our team has a fierce rivalry with McLaren in the Constructors’ Championship, and if they had problems in Las Vegas, they should perform better this weekend, because McLaren has been doing very well throughout the second half of the season. Let’s see what we can do and hope that our team will show a good result in Abu Dhabi.

I certainly feel much more comfortable behind the wheel of the AMR23, although it still has some weaknesses. I think we are not very fast on the straights and the overall chassis lacks efficiency. I actually don’t think we got to Las Vegas that fast. But during the race many things worked out in our favor and we also had good tactics, which allowed us to show a good result, even though our speed there was not at the same level as in Brazil.

If we talk about the whole season, in the first few races of the championship we were initially very strong and really competitive. Halfway through the year there was a slight drop in the level of results, but the last few races gave me a lot of pleasure.”