Stroll: The car snapped, really aggressively

Lance Stroll insists he did nothing different on the lap that saw him exit qualifying for the British GP with his Williams beached in the gravel.

Stroll brought out the red flags in Q1 on Saturday as he spun at the end of the Wellington Straight.

The Canadian’s session was over as his FW41 was beached in the gravel.

“I did the exact same thing I had been doing all weekend into corner six and the car just snapped, really aggressively,” he said.

“We have been fighting stability problems all season as the car is very unpredictable and we have to look into it in more detail.

“It was just odd, as it was so aggressive and I was quite shocked at how it happened so suddenly. Then, I was buried in the gravel and there was nothing that I could do.”

Minutes after the restart his team-mate Sergey Sirotkin also had a spin, doing his at Stowe. He was able to return to the pits.

“We have a phenomenon which we have not seen all year, or indeed ever before, whereby the DRS activation intermittently causes a complete loss of aerodynamic floor loading which does not recover at the entry to the subsequent corner,” explained Chief Technical Officer Paddy Lowe.

“In the case of both spins, the cars entered the corner with no load in the floor which had obvious consequences. We came to this event with a number of new bodywork items which we evaluated during FP1 and FP2.

“This new DRS-related phenomenon was seen only once in FP1 on one of the cars but was incorrectly diagnosed to be related to a particular configuration which we chose not to carry forward into FP2 and for qualifying and the race.

“We must now understand exactly what change in the cars caused this phenomenon which is entirely related to the use of DRS.”