Aston Martin has been the subject of innumerable speculations in the last few months, with various rumors claiming that the team might see a change in ownership soon. According to the September issue of Business F1, Aston Martin Lagonda – the parent car company, is losing $2,000,000 per day, but Lawrence Stroll is still refraining from selling off his team.
Tom Rubython reported that the loss per car has crept up to nearly $30,000 in the last quarter. He also pointed out that the analysts from Goldman Sachs are completely wrong for not advising the owners to sell off the team at this stage.
Stroll has already made two big transactions regarding his team, the first one being the sale of 17% of the team’s share to Chinese automaker Geely for an amount of $174,000,000. This was recently followed up with another sale worth $310,000,000 to what was an unknown entity back then.
After a few days, it was reported that US Private equity firm Arctos had invested in the British team and bought a 10% minority share from Stroll. While Stroll has been going around selling minority stakes to investors, Rubython believes that given the huge losses being incurred by the company, Stroll should look to sell the company completely and move on.
Lawrence Stroll does not want to abandon his ship
There were rumors that the Canadian billionaire would indeed do that and hand over the team’s ownership to someone else. However, Aston Martin F1 managing director Jeff Slack recently confirmed that Stroll is going absolutely nowhere. He explained, “Lawrence is fully committed; he’s not going anywhere.”
Slack had claimed that Aston Martin Lagonda is an extremely important part of Stroll’s life and he won’t be giving it up easily. Also, Stroll apparently has no issues with funds, and therefore, money cannot be the reason for him to leave the ship and walk away.
F1 journalist Joe Saward recently claimed that Stroll wants a $1.6 Billion valuation for his company, but the performance of his son has been the biggest dealbreaker for him till date. Tom Rubython, on the other hand, claims that Geely has the funds to pay off what Stroll wants for his team, and thus, the best option for Stroll would be to sell off his team.
After taking over the team and saving it from the brink of bankruptcy in early 2020, Stroll has left no stone unturned to transform the team and push it up the grid. Therefore, after 3 years of struggle, Stroll probably won’t be ready to give things up so easily.
