As Formula One Strives To Save A Shard Of Its Summer, Aston Martin CEO Lawrence Stroll…

With international borders by no means relaxed and a patchwork ton of uneven lockdown measures rattling in place, Europe is missing a lot of the old, good diversions in the onrush of summer. Such as travel, and eating out. But chief among the longed-for former luxuries is any sort of larger, international sporting reality — or fun for that matter — as generated by Wimbledon, the 2020 European soccer championships, the British Open, or the Tour de France, to name a few of the global sports events staged on the Continent that have been shut down.

Aside from the body-blow to the sports business, it’s a mournful loss to the culture. What league soccer there is — thank you, Bundesliga! — takes place in empty stadia. Like Americans in this fully-asterisked summer without Major League Baseball, PGA golf, or even very much tennis — pending the fate of the US Open, still hanging onto late August in New York by its fingernails — Europeans are just plain missing summer’s chance to get out of the house, drink a bunch of beer, and scream for a team.

Enter Formula 1. For its part, after an ungainly pre-race cancellation in March literally hours before qualifying at Melbourne on March 13 — which outage then instantly grew to eat the whole front end of the season — Formula 1 has been at pains to envision some late-summer action. The organization itself means to realize a European season from July 3 through August and September, moving to Asia and the Gulf through December, with the targeted inaugural grand prix in Austria, at the daunting, dog-leg-filled Red Bull Ring in Styria, home of Niki Lauda’s home-country 1984 Grand Prix triumph when it was known as the Österreich Ring, or the Austria ring.

It’s an auspicious plan that’s hinged, as everything is these days, upon “how we are doing,” code for infection-rate R-numbers remaining below 1, and whether any evidence of a second spike can be detected on the horizon. In Austria, whose premier Sebastian Kurz led an early-March lockdown, those SARS-CoV-2 metrics are looking pretty good. Small shops are open, and public life (read: cafe culture) in Vienna has taken a decided late-spring upswing.

But the fact that a fraction of Vienna’s street culture and custom is slowly building back does not, by a long shot, mean that F1 can stage a weekend with Lewis (Hamilton), Sebastian (Vettel), Daniel (Ricciardo), Kimi (Raikkonen), Charles (Leclerc), Max (Verstappen), Valtteri (Bottas) and that all-important other element for generating bucks with major sports, namely, their fans. The strong likelihood, according to Liberty Media’s post-Bernie F1 supremo Chase Carey, is that spectators will not be invited to the early races.

The voluble Carey explained thusly a few weeks back:

“We’re targeting a start to racing in Europe through July, August and beginning of September, with the first race taking place in Austria on 3-5 July weekend. September, October and November, would see us race in Eurasia, Asia and the Americas, finishing the season in the Gulf in December with Bahrain before the traditional finale in Abu Dhabi, having completed between 15-18 races. We expect the early races to be without fans but hope fans will be part of our events as we move further into the schedule.”

Fingers crossed, then. What was adroit of Mr. Carey and the F1 administration was to take the annual midsummer “factory break” and declare that moved back to the immediate lockdown zone of March and April, as the pandemic shut everything down anyway. All F1 teams “took” the break so that it wouldn’t take up any moments of possible racing in whatever might be left in the new pushed-back 2020 season.

But re-configuring the season on paper doesn’t mean that nothing is happening in the sport, with the biggest F1 news overall being brought by no less an automotive/fashion billionaire than Lawrence Stroll, principal of the Racing Point F1 team, legendary backer of the Hilfiger empire, and founder of the group that bought Aston Martin. Spectacularly, as announced in the teeth of Europe’s SARS-CoV-2 spike on March 30, Aston Martin as led by Stroll will develop a “works” division and participate fully in Racing Point, lending its storied name to the team as of 2021.

F1 is forever need of new principals stepping up to bat, especially in the teeth of the seeming inexorable grip that Mercedes, and alternately the Scuderia — aka, Ferrari — have on the podium through Messrs. Hamilton, Vettel, Leclerc, et. al. Entrepeneur Stroll certainly seems to have the moxie to negotiate a more equable share of the champagne-spraying photo-ops, at the very least. It’s long overdue, as the smaller teams have been telling us for a while, a grander challenge to the ruling triumvirate of Mercedes, Ferarri and by extension Red Bull.

Stroll’s pulling together of Yew Tree, his group of Aston Martin Lagonda investors who now own a reported 25 % of the company, was no small feat, literally saving the brand and then, as the newly-minted maker’s chairman, immediately announcing F1 to be a “central pillar” of marketing and developing the renewed Aston Martin. Luxe car aficionadi as well as the thronging millions of James Bond fans worldwide welcomed Aston Martin being pulled back from the brink — but Stroll doubled down with the coup de grace, having the storied maker re-enter racing on the biggest stage possible, shouldering in next to Mercedes and Ferarri. Given the money pit that racing teams are, it’s also not without its deep risks, but that, too, seems to be something Stroll is comfortable with.

Here’s Stroll speaking with some British industry journalists as he explained the Aston Martin move into F1:

“Not only does Formula 1 help elevate the brand, it opens up the opportunity for technology cross-over,” he said. “I’m incredibly excited to see what technology can filter down from the racing program into the road cars. This will be particularly relevant for the mid-engine road cars that will be launched in the future. There will be a genuine collaboration to ensure that our road cars share the DNA of our success on the track as well.”

In other words, Stroll is in for the long haul. So is his 21-year-old son, Lance, one of Racing Point’s two drivers, who has recently re-upped to drive for his father’s team as it becomes Aston Martin. The Stroll scion is in his fourth year in F1, with just 62 starts and one podium under his belt, that lone distinction having come in his rookie year, 2017, a third-place in Azerbaijan.

Slim as they might seem, there are opportunities, occasionally, for athletes to improve in asterisked seasons. If the 2020 F1 season comes off as planned, it will form a good 15-to-18-race pool — meaning, real races under real pressure against Max Verstappen, Charles Leclerc and their ilk, not practice laps — in which Lance Stroll can polish his driving as Racing Point metamorphoses into Aston Martin. He will need that in the bigger game his father is engineering. As the younger Stroll has been learning from eating as much dust as he has over his three previous seasons, Hamilton and Vettel don’t go out of their way to make a place for you on the grid. You have to get in the race by yourself.