A legacy British luxury automaker has become the grand folly of a Canadian business titan.
Driving the news: Aston Martin’s CEO deflected speculation that Lawrence Stroll — the Canadian billionaire who owns the Aston Martin Formula One racing team and is also the automaker’s top shareholder — is angling to sell his stake after engineering an auspicious rights deal.
Catch-up: Last week, AMR GP Holdings, the team’s holding company indirectly controlled by Stroll, paid Aston Martin £50 million for its naming rights in perpetuity. On its face, it looks like a way for Stroll to inject cash into the struggling automaker that he chairs. But some felt it was a move to secure his F1 team’s future before washing his hands of its namesake.
Big picture: Things aren’t going well for Aston Martin — the automaker or the F1 team.
The automaker is contending with a heavy debt load and perpetually declining sales, issuing its third profit warning in the span of a year in its quarterly earnings call earlier this month. To help stem the bleeding, it announced layoffs affecting 20% of its staff.
The team (which employs Stroll’s son as a driver) is in crisis. It shelled out for famed designer Adrian Newey to help break into the league’s upper crust, but in its first test laps, Newey’s car was four-and-a-half seconds slower than cars from the top teams.
Why it matters: When Stroll took the wheel at Aston Martin in 2020, he promised to revive it as “one of the pre-eminent luxury car brands in the world.” Instead, it’s looking like a black mark for a big name in Canadian business.—QH