- Stroll trades Formula 1 misery for GT debut at Circuit Paul Ricard this weekend.
- A dinner in Suzuka, two cancelled Grands Prix, and a phone call made it happen.
- Comtoyou Racing gives him a car. Now Stroll wants to give them a win.
Lance Stroll is racing this weekend. Not in Formula 1, not under the pressure of a championship battle, but at Circuit Paul Ricard in the south of France.
He will be strapped into an Aston Martin Vantage AMR GT3 EVO for the opening round of the 2026 GT World Challenge Europe season.
For a driver whose year in F1 has already been crushing, both mentally and physically, the timing could not be more deliberate.
The Canadian has not finished a single Grand Prix in 2026. Three races, three non-classifications. That fact sits quietly behind everything he said ahead of his GT debut, even when he was not saying it directly.
A plan hatched over dinner in Japan
The idea did not come from a boardroom meeting. It came from a dinner table.
During the Japanese Grand Prix weekend at Suzuka, Stroll and a group of friends sat down on a Saturday evening and asked a simple question.
What do you do with a month off? The answer, somewhere between the main course and dessert, turned into a race entry.
Two April Grands Prix, the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian rounds, had been cancelled. That left a five-week gap in the F1 calendar, and Stroll moved quickly to fill it.
Within days, he had a car, a team and a plan.
Comtoyou Racing, a Belgian squad with a strong GT record, came together around him. Team owner Jean-Michel Baert was the man who made the logistics work.
“Jean-Michel was very accommodating, and we organised everything in about a week,” Stroll said via the official GT World Challenge Europe website. “Honestly, without Jean-Michel bringing everything together so quickly, it wouldn’t have been possible.”
Baert, for his part, remembered how the whole thing began. He recalled that Stroll’s very first words on arrival at the team were not a greeting. They were a thank you.
“When Lance arrived, the first thing he said, before even saying hello, was: ‘Thank you for making this possible.’ That really meant a lot,” Baert said.
The car, the team, the challenge and the adjustment
Stroll has not driven a GT car in almost 10 years. His first reacquaintance came last week at the Nürburgring, a shakedown session that gave him a feel for machinery that operates in an entirely different register from an F1 car.
The contrast is significant. A modern F1 car pins you to the circuit with enormous downforce and responds to the smallest inputs with surgical precision.
A GT3 car is looser, more physical and more forgiving. Stroll described the shift plainly:
“It’s different. Less downforce, less power, but it moves more. You can attack kerbs more, which is different.”
He also noted something that might surprise people who have never sat in heavy traffic at racing speed. “In traffic, you can follow cars much more closely than in Formula 1,” he said. In an endurance race, that matters quite a lot.
He will share the car across the six-hour race with two co-drivers. Roberto Merhi, a former F1 driver with Manor, brings race mileage and a long-standing personal connection with Stroll.
Mari Boya, a current Aston Martin Academy driver competing in Formula 2, brings talent and a hunger to prove himself. Stroll praised the younger driver directly.
“He’s very talented, not very experienced, but this is a great opportunity for him,” he said.
All three are racing in the GT World Challenge for the first time. That shared inexperience in the series bonds them as much as anything else.
Why ‘winning is possible’ matters
Stroll’s pre-race remarks revealed his motivation to take part in the event in the first place.
“In Formula 1, you don’t always have the opportunity to win,” he said. “Even if it’s our first time and we lack experience, if everything comes together, winning is possible. That doesn’t really exist in Formula 1. That’s also a big motivation.”
Formula 1, particularly in the midfield and the team lower down, can grind a driver’s competitive spirit quietly. You prepare, you push, you finish eighth and call it a good day. Stroll is not even at a team where scoring points is a routine. He is in a team still struggling to run its car right.
GT Racing offers something different. Not a lesser challenge, but a more interesting one.
He was candid, too, about the atmosphere. Fewer cameras, fewer obligations, more time in the garage among friends.
“I get to share the car with friends, so we laugh outside the car, enjoy ourselves inside the car, and the team is really great,” he said.
But he was equally clear that the relaxed setting does not soften his drive. “Whenever I’m in the car with my helmet on, whether it’s here, Formula 1, or even karting, it’s always the same mindset,” he added.
The smile is for outside the car. Inside, nothing changes.
A link to Verstappen and a wider F1 trend
Lance Stroll is not alone in trying racing outside F1. Max Verstappen recently competed in the local German endurance championship in the NLS2. He is also set to make his debut at the Nürburgring 24 Hours in May.
The two drivers spoke briefly about it in Japan, with Stroll noting that Verstappen’s existing enthusiasm for GT cars helped shape the conversation. “Everyone enjoys driving GT3 cars; they’re fun,” Stroll said.
There is a small, neat footnote to this weekend. Verstappen has a team, Mercedes-AMG Team Verstappen Racing, also entered at Paul Ricard.
He will not be there in person, but his name is on the entry list all the same.
If the weekend goes well, Stroll has signalled he wants more of it. He said he would like to continue racing in GT events through the year, subject to how he feels.
That is not the language of someone ticking a box. That is someone who has found, maybe for the first time in a while, a racing environment where the effort feels proportionate to the reward.
The six-hour race at Paul Ricard is where it starts. The result is still unknown. But Lance Stroll showed up here not to make up the numbers. He showed up because he believes he can win.
That belief, right now, is worth something.
