Even before you meet Lawrence Stroll, there’s a foolproof way of forming a strong impression of his success and prowess at leadership.
Just take a walk along the wide central corridor of his brand-new, £200 million Formula 1 team headquarters, built on the site of the old Jordan and Force India factories at Silverstone.
It will teach you much of what you need to know in a short time – especially if your guide, like ours, is an Aston Martin insider who has worked in other F1 teams and knows the differences.
Aston Martin Aramco F1 is now “by a mile” the best-equipped team in the sport, your guide will tell you with pride, and the winning ambition of its Big Boss and his 800 employees fully matches the fabulous facilities.
This place is filled with the anticipation of success, part of which comes from the fact that Stroll is the only remaining “old-style” F1 team owner, involved every day in leading a winning business.
The Frank Williams and Ron Dennis characters are gone: apart from Stroll, today’s F1 team owners are OEMs and investment funds. Building this F1 team would have been a mammoth achievement if Stroll and Aston Martin had taken 20 years to create it, but the opportunity arrived “very unexpected and unplanned” about six years ago, says Stroll, when we settle in his corner office, sumptuous but simple, to hear the story.
There had been lots of time before the meeting to wonder what it – and he – would be like. This Canadian billionaire, who cites fashion as his business and cars as his passion, has a reputation even among business equals for being a tough character who wastes little time getting to the point.
Photographs usually show a poker player’s features, unsmiling, hard to read and absolutely no pushover. Today has apparently turned into a busier day than Stroll expected: will urgent business pressures make our talk too much of a pain in the backside? It has happened before.
Stroll turns out to be affable and candid, even if our time with him is to be strictly limited. He reacts graciously to our congratulations on his well-earned Outstanding Leader award. Decisive leaders, he agrees, are vital if you’re to build success.
He admits he never expected to own an F1 team, let alone one of the world’s great heritage car brands, but Stroll has strong motoring connections. He has a huge Ferrari collection and was the Canadian Ferrari importer for 20 years. He had a decent career as a gentleman race driver, and for a while he owned a Canadian race circuit.
Back when Peter Collins and Peter Wright were running Team Lotus, his Tommy Hilfiger fashion brand sponsored them. And he often attended F1 races with his late friend Mansour Ojjeh, the majority shareholder in McLaren during Dennis’s time.
The opportunity to buy an F1 team arrived with a bang when Force India’s Vijay Mallya was forced out of business: Stroll bought the team out of administration in August 2018 for £90 million, assuming another £15m in debt and changing the name to Racing Point.
“I always admired F1,” says Stroll. “I could see that this was a global sport with three times the eyeballs of, say, NFL in North America. Today, an NFL team is worth $10 billion, and it seemed to me that with a much bigger global audience, an F1 team should have an even bigger price tag.”
The big contradiction, he says, was F1’s lack of a budget cap, which essentially divided teams into “the guys at the top and the others”. Top teams’ costs were met by the marketing budgets of cigarette brands, car makers or fizzy drink manufacturers.
If you wanted to run an F1 team as a profit-earning business, reckoned Stroll, you had no chance under the old system. But the arrival of Liberty Media as F1’s owner changed things. The budget cap they introduced set out to level the playing field.
“The budget cap is nowhere near perfect,” says Stroll, “but at least there is some sort of limit. Here was this team, 31 years old since Eddie Jordan started it, now called Force India. I saw the sport going in the right direction and thought that with my vision, my passion – and my money – one day we might make it great.”
All of which has led to today’s Aston Martin Aramco F1 set-up, an organisation Stroll acknowledges as being far from complete. Part of the build-up has been the celebrated hiring of Adrian Newey, widely acknowledged as the world’s greatest race car designer, to work on a car for next year’s technology changes.
Reviewing Stroll’s Aston Martin, it’s tempting to look for comparisons with the business of Enzo Ferrari, who famously claimed that his road car concern existed only to finance his racing. But Stroll negates that idea, stressing that pure business logic was his original reason for getting into F1. The name came later.
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.
Under Stroll, the company is focused on delivering sustainable growth that is profitable and scalable. Yet the share price still wanes, despite recent cash injections and support from Stroll and other strategic investors.
It all begs the killer question: how confident is Stroll that the business of making road-going Aston Martins can be viable? Stroll relaxes as he answers. “I’ve never been as confident of anything in my life,” he says. “I wouldn’t keep putting money into something I didn’t believe in. You wouldn’t be sitting here in a place I’ve just spent £200 million to create. I believe Aston Martin has a phenomenal future.”
Stroll acknowledges there are problems. Buying the company just before Covid certainly didn’t help, and even before that there were massive supply-chain issues. Aston experienced production delays for the DB12 and difficulties integrating a new platform for its new infotainment system.
But the product portfolio, insists Stroll, has never been better in the history of Aston Martin – and this is only the beginning. What about profits, the measure of success in Stroll’s own book?
“As we’ve stated,” he says, “in the second half of this year we’ll be cash-flow positive. That means next year will be cash-flow positive; when I took over the company, we were burning £300 million a year. The second half of this year is a critical turnaround point for us. I said it would take the first five years of our 10-year plan, and that’s what is happening. Now it’s all about growth.”
Such is Stroll’s infectious passion I feel we could talk all day, but I am conscious of his busy schedule so ask just one more question: would Stroll regard rebuilding Aston Martin as his life’s work? Every other car boss on the planet would hide from that one.
Even as I ask, I’m not expecting a straight answer, even from this straight talker. But Stroll steps right up. “Yes, it is,” he says. I’ll be 66 in July and I’ll do this another 10 years, maybe 15. I gotta work. Not for financial reasons, but just mentally.”
And what will success look like? “Here’s my thinking,” says Stroll. “Ferrari has a business making 14,000 cars a year. They have a Formula 1 team to market it and they’re worth about £90 billion. We will continue to deliver disciplined volume growth and improved profitability, and we have a Formula 1 team to market that. Can you imagine what the potential value might be? I’ll leave you to speculate.”
