'Lawrence Stroll is just burning money at Aston Martin'
- GPblog.com
Aston Martin has had a dramatic start to the season. Not only was Sebastian Vettel missing from the first two Grands Prix, but the team is also seriously lacking in speed. Colin Kolles thinks that the team's decline is mainly due to Lawrance Stroll himself, who has no idea what he is doing.
Aston Martin a vanity project by Stroll
Kolles has little good to say about the state of affairs at Aston Martin. According to the former team boss, Aston Martin is nothing more than a vanity project of Stroll to give his son Lance a permanent place in Formula 1. "He knows everything best and puts his son at the center with all his power. To me, that is the totally wrong approach," Kolles said at Sport1.de.
In Formula 1, Kolles worked for teams such as Jordan, Midland, Spyker and Force India, the predecessor of what is now Aston Martin. The Romanian former team boss doesn't think it will work at Aston Martin anymore. "They have a team owner who thinks he is the team owner," he said. As a result, Stroll is doing nothing but throwing money away at Aston Martin. "If you throw a million on the fire, the money will burn up just as fast as in Formula 1 if you don't know what you're doing."
Vettel doesn't want to drive at all
Kolles goes on to blast Aston Martin. According to him, the team's star driver doesn't even want to come back. "I think he doesn't want to drive at all, he just doesn't want to do that to himself." It was even rumored that the covid infection was an excuse not to drive. "I'm sure he thinks a lot about whether he should still be doing what he's doing."
For now, at least, things are not going to work out at Aston Martin, Kolles thinks. He doesn't see the team going anywhere as long as Martin Whitmarsh is the team boss and Stroll doesn't recognize that he needs to stay home, set the budget and let the people who know what they are doing get the people to run the team. Twelfth place in both Bahrain and Saudi Arabia was Aston Martin's best result to date. The team is ninth with zero points.