Stroll rues tyre failure which cost him potential Mugello F1 podium

Lance Stroll is unsure of the cause of his rear left Formula 1 tyre failure which occurred while running fourth at the Tuscan Grand Prix.

Stroll was just outside of the podium places at Mugello but crashed out spectacularly when his rear left tyre failed.

The Canadian doesn’t know what caused the tyre failure but believes without it, he had a shot at the podium with the Renault of Daniel Ricciardo running just ahead of him.

"It’s a shame I couldn’t bring it home today," Stroll said. "I don’t know if it was a puncture or a suspension failure, we have to look into it. It felt like a puncture but at that speed it’s so hard to tell what it was. We’ll do some investigating and find out."

"We had great pace and we were on for a podium," Stroll added. "We were hunting down Ricc Ricciardo] and it was going to get exciting there at the end..."

Team boss Otmar Szafnauer didn’t have a definitive answer to what caused the spin but suggested it could have been down to some debris left on the circuit.

“So initially Lance thought it was a puncture, that’s what he reported to us,” Szafnauer said. “We immediately looked at the tyre pressure and for sure the tyre pressure was at zero, but that was after he already hit the barrier so not before. We got to find out what it was. 

“Thereafter I saw exactly what you saw and Lance did too, and he thinks it may have been a bit of carbon debris that could have gone into his left rear and caused the puncture, and then the spin.”

Racing Point introduced an impressive new bargeboard package for this weekend which was rumoured to be worth 0.2s to 0.3s, with it only being run on Stroll’s car.

With Stroll’s car completely destroyed following the crash, Szafnauer admitted the team has a lot of work to do to ensure both drivers have the update for the Russian Grand Prix in a fortnight’s time.

“He did have the upgrade so now I don’t know… we’re going to have to do a lot of work to get the parts together so both of them have the upgrade in Russia,” Szafnauer added.”