By Alan Baldwin
LONDON (Reuters) – Lance Stroll made light of last year’s agonies as the Aston Martin driver looked forward to starting a Formula One season without injuries.
The 25-year-old Canadian, son of billionaire team owner Lawrence, turned up at the 2023 opener in Bahrain with a broken big toe and wrists after a cycling accident in Spain two weeks earlier.
“My apartment is stacked with pillows and I’m not allowed to leave,” he joked when asked ahead of his team’s new car launch on Monday what precautions he was taking in training for the season starting on March 2.
“I’m running. I’m watching my step while I run. No ankle twisting, none of that funny business. Just running in a straight stride.
“Just looking after my limbs and I want to get to Bahrain testing this year.”
The photographs on social media of Stroll snowboarding through a forest in January suggested a slightly different story.
“I enjoyed a bit of time off with friends and family, eating a few more doughnuts and drinking a few more beers but still training hard and now I’m ready to get back to racing,” he admitted of the winter break.
As well as skiing in Western Canada, he said he had also spent a lot of time reflecting on last season and thinking about how to come back stronger.
Team mate Fernando Alonso was on the podium eight times last year and finished fourth overall with 206 points. Stroll was 10th and scored only 74.
“Last year for sure he was just quicker,” said Stroll. “I have some ideas on where to work on some things that I want to improve on.
“I think we had a lot of misfortune last year and that kind of made things more challenging,” he added. “There were a lot of races where we had technical issues. Things just didn’t go our way.
“Testing is really important just to get an idea what the car’s doing… I’ll be at testing this year and having that is definitely going to be helpful. Two healthy wrists make life a bit easier in a race car.”
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Christian Radnedge)
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