Stroll pleased to fight from last row to P12 after 'frustrating' penalty for weaving

Lance Stroll offered a staunch defence in a valiant effort to earn Aston Martin points at Albert Park, but the Canadian driver fell short. Yet, having finished P12 from P19, there were positives for him to take from Australia.

Stroll crashed out of qualifying and started 19th with a three-place grid penalty. Beginning the race on hard compounds, he made it up as high as P9 but couldn't quite hold off Pierre Gasly and Valtteri Bottas as he came home 12th (main video).

SAY WHAT? Leclerc, Albon, Hamilton and Verstappen feature in the best team radio from Australia

"Yes, it was a good effort, we tried to pick up a point but we just didn’t really have the pace. The balance was not great, didn’t really have the front tyres and just got swallowed up at the end," said Stroll.

For weaving on the straight in his defence against Bottas, the Aston Martin driver also received a five-second penalty – though it didn't demote him further down than P12.

"The five-second penalty was frustrating, even though it didn't change our final race position. I caught Valtteri after the Virtual Safety Car and made up a place so it was frustrating to receive a penalty for weaving," he added.

The driver also made sure to thank his team for repairing his car – first after he crashed out late in FP3, and again when he crashed out of Q1 in an incident with Nicholas Latifi.

"I also want to say thank you to the team once again; everybody did a tremendous job to get the cars repaired this weekend. We will keep our heads up and dig deep to try to extract more from the car in the races to come.

READ MORE: New Aston Martin boss Krack reflects on team’s ‘very difficult weekend’ in Australia

"I think we had the right idea with our strategy by running the majority of the race on the hard tyre, but we will look over the data and see what else we can learn," he added.

Aston Martin head to Imola as the only team without points on the board, Sebastian Vettel having retired from his first race of 2022.

Tap here to find out more about F1 TV, including enhanced race coverage, exclusive shows, archive video and more.