Lance Stroll is the new holder of an unwanted Formula 1 record: the most Q1 exits since the debut of the three-segment qualifying in 2006.
Asked about claiming the record with his 75th Q1 exit last Saturday at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, Stroll said: "You put the McLaren drivers in a Sauber for 10 years and they will have the most Q1 exits. It's car-dependent."
That's prompted Sundaram Ramaswami and Namanpreet Kaur to dig into the data of Stroll's Q1 eliminations and how that compares to the records of the team-mates he's had over his nine years in F1.
Frequency of Q1 exits
Stroll has had 75 Q1 exits in his 173 grand prix appearances, giving him a 43.35% rate of going out in Q1.
He's made it to Q2 and been eliminated there 58 times - so just over a third of his F1 qualifying efforts have ended that way.
He has a total of 40 Q3 appearances - a rate of 23.12%.
The year-on-year trend
Exactly 20% of those Q1 exits (15 Q1 knockouts) came during Stroll's 2018 season in a Williams that was clearly F1's slowest car that year.
Things weren't much better in 2019, with 14 Q1 exits during his first year with Racing Point (now Aston Martin), two more than he had during his rookie year with Williams in 2017.
There weren't any Q1 exits in 2020 for Stroll with the most competitive F1 car he's ever had at his disposal, the RP20. Instead, he had a record-high 11 Q3 appearances.
A total of 12 Q1 exits in 2022 stands as his highest of the ground effect era so far, with five in 2024 the lowest.
Stroll vs his team-mates
Stroll says Q1 exits are very "car-dependent", so a good measurement is always what the driver in the other car has done.
Stroll has had some tough team-mates, starting out alongside 11-time grand prix winner Felipe Massa during his rookie year, and he's been paired with two multiple world champions since 2021.
Stroll has been outqualifed by his team-mates in F1 for 130 of the 173 races that they've both contested.
And current team-mate Fernando Alonso has inflicted his heaviest qualifying defeats, beating him 43-8 across their two and a bit seasons together.
Alonso has had just four Q1 exits to Stroll's 15 since they became team-mates at the start of 2023. Alonso has made it to Q3 36 times during that spell, while Stroll has got there on 16 occasions so far.
Stroll’s record versus his first world champion team-mate Sebastian Vettel was better. Vettel outqualified him 27-15, with Vettel experiencing 13 Q1 exits to Stroll's 18.
Discounting his record versus stand-ins Paul di Resta and Nico Hulkenberg, Stroll's closest qualifying match-up was against Sergey Sirotkin at Williams in 2018. Sirotkin beat Stroll 13-8 in qualifying, but he had 16 Q1 exits to Stroll's 15.
Stroll has never outqualified an F1 team-mate across a full season.
Stroll's place in record books
Stroll is unlikely to shed this unwanted F1 record anytime soon. In fact, he's guaranteed to keep it for the rest of 2025 even if he were to escape Q1 in each of the remaining 19 F1 weekends.
That's barring a shock comeback for any of the other four drivers in the top five, who are all now out of F1.
Of those, Nicholas Latifi has the weakest record by percentage, going out in Q1 in 90.16% of the 61 grands prix qualifying sessions he participated in.
Then it’s Marcus Ericsson, with a 72.16% hit rate, followed by Timo Glock, with 64.84% of his outings ending in Q1.
Only Kevin Magnussen has a better percentage than Stroll in the bottom five, with a Q1 elimination rate of 39.57%.
But those drivers are evidence of Q1 exits being an imperfect measure of a driver's capability.
Glock, for example, spent three of his five of his full-time F1 seasons in Virgin/Marussia machinery that left Q1 just once (thanks to an inspired slick tyre gamble at a wet Sepang circuit in 2010) and never came anywhere close to scoring points.
Similarly, around half of Heikki Kovalainen's career qualifying attempts ended with a Q1 exit. But that was because he was saddled with inferior Lotus/Caterham machinery for three of his six full-time seasons.
Stroll has had better machinery than that for most of his F1 career, but he too has had the slowest F1 car, notably throughout his second year with Williams in 2018.
The team-mate qualifying comparisons offer a far more accurate representation of an F1 driver's level, so you'd be better judging Stroll on that than this slightly unfortunate new record.
