Aston Martin's Lance Stroll, normally one of the most low-volume drivers in the press pen, has chosen the post-Miami window to deliver an unusually frank attack on Formula 1's new rules.
The Canadian had a busy five-week break — too busy, by some measures, for an F1 driver. He tested an F3 car. And in his telling, that detour exposed exactly what is wrong with the championship that pays his salary.
"It is like 1,000 times more fun and better to drive because you have your right foot. You give what you want and you get what you want," Stroll said of his F3 stint.
The 2026 cars by contrast feel hollow to him. He described them as carrying "no character or no noise" into a corner. The word he reached for was the most pointed any active driver has used about the new generation of machinery.
"It is fake," Stroll said.
It is not just the soundtrack and the driver feel. The fundamental shape of the racing has been undone, in his view, by an energy-deployment system that punishes any attempt to push at maximum throughout a lap.
"It is just destroying the racing, the qualifying laps," he said. "I think it is so fundamentally flawed, but I'm not an engineer, but it is just sad that we're in this situation now."
The mid-season tweaks introduced before Miami have softened some of the harshest energy cliff edges, but Stroll does not consider them a fix. He thinks the cars remain "miles off" where F1 should be, and he expects the situation to last.
"We'll have to live with these rules for the next three or four years," he said.
His verdict cuts squarely across F1's commercial mood music. Miami sold out, the broadcast figures are healthy, and Toto Wolff used the same weekend to tell critics of the regulations to "hide" after Kimi Antonelli sealed a third straight win from pole. None of that is reaching Stroll. He is producing the kind of soundbites that would normally come from a rival paddock, not from a team that spent the winter brokering the arrival of Adrian Newey on a multi-year design contract.
Aston Martin's politics make the timing trickier still. Newey is set to miss multiple races after a recent hospitalisation, putting the team's design direction under additional scrutiny. Stroll, meanwhile, has reportedly cooled on simulator work and prefers analogue testing miles, of which the F3 day was a rare example.
The drivers who have publicly criticised the regulations now read like a who's who of the grid: Russell, Verstappen, Gasly, Norris in different forms, and now Stroll in the most categorical version yet. The FIA's six-point fix list is in train. Whether it can ever address the words that landed at Miami is another matter.
"It is fake," Stroll said again. The line will follow F1 for the rest of 2026.
