This team was all-British and had been at Silverstone for 31 years,” he says. “I wanted the greatest name for it, and that was Aston Martin. At the time [Aston Martin’s] owner, an Italian private equity firm, was sponsoring Red Bull. I went to them and said I could offer much more than just being a sticker on a Red Bull. But they had a public flotation planned and didn’t want to change anything. So I bought my [F1] team in July, they did their IPO in October. But I stayed in the loop, and about a year later we started talking…”
In 2020 an investment group led by Stroll took a 16.7% interest in Aston Martin. He sees it as a career high. “Look,” he says passionately, “I’m a brand guy. I know how much it costs and how long it takes to build a brand. Aston Martin is an iconic British institution.
To own it is the biggest dream in the world, a fantasy. Sadly, the company had got into financial difficulties and needed a big injection of cash, but for a dream like this I was prepared to do it.” Stroll took control as executive chairman one week before the Covid lockdowns began. But he had owned Aston Martins before and now saw twin opportunities: to improve the road cars – “buyers respected them but never thought they were the fastest or had the latest technology” – and to rebrand his Racing Point F1 team as Aston Martin.
“This sport has 2.3 billion watchers a year,” he says. “What better platform could there be for marketing a road car company globally?”
Although our conversation so far has mainly been about F1, Stroll makes it crystal clear that the road car side of the business is as important to him as the racing: it’s one reason why he took such trouble to attract talented former Bentley and JLR boss Adrian Hallmark to the Aston fold.
Hallmark is renowned as one of the best strategic thinkers in the car business – which is just what you need to help engineer a dramatic turnaround. Stroll claims, and Autocar’s testers agree, that Aston Martin’s production models have improved greatly in recent years. The DBX SUV is a success, and Aston is entering the mid-engined plug-in hybrid segment for the first time this year with the Valhalla.