- Stroll returns to GT racing after 8 years, only to drown in penalties at Paul Ricard.
- A race-free month and a dinner conversation set the whole thing in motion.
- Stroll’s lap times impressed, but the damage was done before he took the wheel.
Lance Stroll’s return to GT racing lasted six hours and ended in humiliation. The Canadian F1 driver was sharing the #18 Comtoyou Racing Aston Martin GT3 Vantage with Roberto Merhi and Mari Boya.
The team crossed the line 48th overall at Circuit Paul Ricard on Saturday night, weighed down by eight minutes and 25 seconds of penalties accumulated across the opening round of the 2026 GT World Challenge Europe season.
It was not the debut anyone had imagined.
A return born from frustration
The story of how Stroll ended up at Paul Ricard begins at a dinner table in Japan.
During the Japanese Grand Prix weekend, Stroll sat down with former F1 driver Roberto Merhi. The two had history in motorsport circles, and somewhere between the meal and the conversation, the idea of sharing a GT3 car took shape.
What followed moved at remarkable speed.
Stroll had reason to want a change of scenery. Aston Martin has yet to score a point in the 2026 F1 season. He has yet to finish a grand prix.
The sport he has dedicated his career to was, at that moment, offering him very little in return.
“My concentration has been entirely on Formula 1,” Stroll said via RacingNews365. “But this season our machinery lacks competitiveness, and we now have this racing hiatus. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to try something different, adopt an alternative perspective during the break.”
Before committing, the Canadian driver sought advice from someone who understood the transition. He called Max Verstappen, who has been racing in the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie as preparation for the Nürburgring 24 Hours in May.
That Stroll would consult a four-time world champion before a GT debut speaks to how seriously he took the opportunity.
Comtoyou team principal Jean-Michel Baert put everything together in roughly a week. Lance Stroll was grateful.
“Honestly, without Jean-Michel bringing everything together so quickly, it wouldn’t have been possible,” he said.
Baert, for his part, remembered Stroll’s arrival at the circuit. “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.
“Having someone like him choose our team is a huge recognition of our work, the mechanics, the engineers.”
A star-studded grid and a familiar venue
The F1 calendar provided the window. The Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix were both cancelled due to ongoing conflict in the Middle East, leaving Stroll and several other high-profile names with time to fill.
Paul Ricard, the former home of the French Grand Prix, drew a grid that felt more like a motorsport reunion than a sportscar season opener.
The #48 Mercedes of Lucas Auer, Luca Stolz and Maro Engel took pole. Verstappen’s own GT3 team, with Daniel Juncadella, Chris Lulham and Jules Gounon, qualified eighth. MotoGP champion Valentino Rossi’s BMW squad lined up 11th.
Stroll’s #18 Comtoyou entry featured Merhi, a former Manor F1 driver, and Boya, an Aston Martin Academy prospect currently competing in Formula 2.
Qualifying was divided into three segments, one per driver.
Boya set the car’s best time: a 1:53.676. Stroll went out in the second segment and clocked a 1:54.472, eight-tenths behind his co-driver.
Their combined average placed them 15th overall and 11th in the Pro class. It was Boya’s first experience of sportscar racing.
Stroll arrived at the circuit with belief. “In F1, you don’t always have the opportunity to win,” he said.
He saw GT racing as a place where that possibility felt more real. The camaraderie helped too. “I get to share the car with friends,” he said, “so we laugh outside the car, enjoy ourselves inside the car, and the team is really great.”
A race to forget: eight minutes of penalties and a 48th-place finish
What followed over those six hours steadily, perhaps even brutally, dismantled the optimism.
Boya triggered a stop-and-go penalty after being judged to have caused a collision. The team then collected four minutes of penalties for ignoring the blue flags.
Another three minutes and 40 seconds arrived for exceeding track limits. By the time the chequered flag fell under the night sky, the penalty sheet read eight minutes and 25 seconds in total.
Blue flag violations are a particular trap for GT newcomers.
In endurance racing, cars being lapped must yield promptly to the class leaders, a discipline that single-seater drivers, trained to battle for positions rather than traffic management, can struggle to absorb quickly.
Stroll himself was responsible for one minute of those penalties for a blue flag infraction and a further 115 seconds for exceeding track limits, bringing his personal share to nearly four and a half minutes.
Yet the penalties that truly shaped the team’s race arrived before Stroll even put on his helmet.
Merhi and Boya had already accumulated a significant portion of the damage by the time Stroll climbed in during the night.
Observers noted that his lap times, when he finally ran, were respectable. The pace was there. The craft of endurance racing, the patience, and the awareness of a multiclass field still need to be built.
A GT return eight years in the making
Stroll last raced in GT machinery in 2018, when he was still finding his feet as an F1 talent. Nearly eight years passed before Saturday night at Paul Ricard brought him back to sportscar racing.
The circumstances were different this time: an F1 career in a difficult stretch, a team still searching for its first point of the season, and a break in the calendar that opened the door.
The result was painful. But the willingness to seek out competition even when his F1 team was struggling, perhaps especially then, was the most telling detail of the entire weekend.
Whether a longer GT programme follows remains unclear. What Paul Ricard showed, however, is that the hunger is genuine, and the pace is also decent if you are willing to look past the mountain of penalties.
