Lawrence Stroll is a man who knows what he wants, and has the money to ensure he gets it. Formerly a businessman who invested in fashion brands, Stroll is now a billionaire Formula 1 team owner, and what he wants is to turn that team into a vehicle that can make his son Lance world champion.

Stroll Sr has said he believes this is “absolutely achievable”. But while it remains to be seen whether his son can justify Stroll’s faith, the immediate task is one of team building. And so far project Stroll – aka the Aston Martin F1 team – is progressing well.

Aston Martin finished last year’s F1 world championship in seventh place. That position rather belied the progress they had made through the year, which they started with just about the slowest car on track, but ended with Lance Stroll and former team-mate Sebastian Vettel regularly competing on track with Alpine and McLaren, the two teams that had contested fourth place in the championship.

Even so, no one was expecting the quantum leap that happened at the start of 2023. Stroll’s new team-mate Fernando Alonso, signed from Alpine to replace Vettel, was an immediate podium contender and he and his new team became arguably the story of the first half of the season.

Alonso scored six podium finishes in the first eight races, and in Monaco, where the Spaniard was the only driver able to stay in touch with Max Verstappen’s Red Bull, he could have won had Aston Martin made a different tyre choice at a pitstop during a late rain shower.

“Liberty’s plans convinced Stroll that F1 teams could be worth $1bn”

At the summer break, Aston Martin were third in the constructors’ championship, behind only Red Bull and Mercedes, and Alonso third in the drivers’ title race behind Verstappen and his team-mate Sergio Pérez.

Even allowing for a slump through the summer and into the autumn, and a drop of a couple of positions in both championships, it is one of the most remarkable turnarounds ever seen in F1, and it has confirmed Aston Martin’s presence at the sport’s top table.

What might appear an overnight sensation, though, is anything but. The foundations of this year’s achievements started to be laid five years ago.

In August 2018, Stroll saved the Force India team from administration and gave it the rather inelegant temporary name of Racing Point. At the end of the season, Lance Stroll moved across from Williams, with whom he had contested his first two seasons in Formula 1, and Lawrence’s ambitions began to take shape.

Stroll avoids the media and did no interviews in his first three seasons in charge, so for a while his vision for his new team was unclear. But the ruthlessness with which he was prepared to pursue it became apparent first in 2020, when the team produced a car that was a virtual carbon copy of the previous year’s Mercedes.

Rivals were furious, and although Racing Point got away with it to a large degree, a design detail caught them out. Their rear brake ducts were found to be an exact copy of those of the 2019 Mercedes, and as these were on the list of parts that have to be of a team’s own design, they had broken the rules. They were handed a £360,000 fine and a penalty of 15 championship points.

That was the difference between finishing third and fourth in the championship. Even so, when Pérez won at Sakhir towards the end of 2020 – his penultimate race for the team before being replaced by Vettel for 2021 – it seemed to be a confirmation of progress.

A rebranding as Aston Martin for 2021, following Stroll’s takeover of the beleaguered sports car company, was further emphasis of ambition, and Stroll chose this moment to end his self-imposed media blackout, and conduct a handful of interviews with carefully chosen, high-profile outlets.

He revealed plans for a state-of-the-art new factory costing in the region of £200m, discussed his plans to make Lance world champion, and how he had never wanted to be an F1 team owner.

“Stroll is on the same playing field as Ferrari or McLaren”

He cited the old joke – how do you become a millionaire in F1? Start with a billion and buy a team. But he explained that F1 owner Liberty Media’s plans to grow the business and effectively make all the teams franchises, following the model of US sports such as the NFL, had convinced him F1 teams could be worth $1bn before too long. This, Stroll said, was a business opportunity.

His purchase of Aston Martin, he explained, was a separate venture, based on his long-lived love for the brand and his belief that it could follow the growth of Ferrari and move from selling 4000 cars a year to 10,000 with the right model lines. But once he had it, he realised that the best way to market Aston Martin the road-car company was through an F1 team of the same name. “So that’s when the whole picture became clear,” Stroll said.

At this stage, the plan was to continue a partnership with Mercedes that not only included using their engine, but also using their wind tunnel and purchasing the back end of their car, giving up design freedom on both gearbox and rear suspension. But over time, that has changed.

By September 2021, the new factory site had been expanded to include a new wind tunnel. And now time is running out on the Mercedes arrangement, too. From 2026, Aston Martin will use Honda engines, and build their entire car themselves. Stroll, it may be becoming clear by now, is not a man who really does modesty. He thinks big, and he lives big. He and Lance each have their own private plane, and sometimes they fly in tandem together to a place, just in case one of them decides to go on somewhere else afterwards.

It is said that when he realised he did not like the view from his office in the new factory – it looks over the unlovely buildings of the Silverstone Innovation Park – Stroll ordered £135,000 worth of trees to block it. When they turned up, he didn’t like the trees, so he sent them away and ordered others – at an even greater cost.

As the owner of an F1 team and a producer of desirable, high-speed road cars, he is on the same playing field as Ferrari or McLaren, but he insists his plans for expanding out of F1 into a road-car business will be realised better than Ron Dennis’s McLaren Technology Centre.

The MTC is an architectural marvel befitting its celebrated designer, Sir Norman Foster. But in response to questions as to the merit of the building as a working F1 base, Dennis once pondered rhetorically: “Have I built myself a pyramid, you mean?”

Stroll seems to be referencing that remark, and the limitations the MTC is now perceived to have as an F1 headquarters, when he says: “This is the reverse of what Ron Dennis did with Norman Foster. This is a business, this is a factory and campus, fit for purpose to match the DNA and culture of ourselves, the purpose it’s been built for, to be efficient and streamlined, to have everyone sitting side by side under one roof, taking into account where the sport will go in the future.”

He had, he said, “a long-term plan. It’s something I intend to be involved in for many years to come. You do not make this kind of investment with the plan to retreat in any way, shape or form”.

Of his vision to make Lance world champion, he said: “I think that would be any father’s dream.” The timescale was “the next three to five years”.

A factory, of course, needs a workforce, and here, too, Stroll has gone about his work with directness and ambition. Aston Martin needed to strengthen the aerodynamic department, so what did they do? They poached two of the leading people from the two top teams at the time.

Dan Fallows, formerly Red Bull’s head of aerodynamics under Adrian Newey, signed in June 2021 and started work as technical director in April 2022. Eric Blandin, who held the same position at Mercedes, signed in November 2021 and joined as Fallows’ deputy in June 2022. Their first work together is the 2023 car.

Performance director Tom McCullough, who has been with the team since 2013, credits chief technical officer Andrew Green for a large part of the restructure that has moved Aston Martin on to another level. Until last year, Green led F1 design, but he has now been moved on to other aspects of the business.

“It was part of Andrew Green’s aim,” McCullough says, “to have input from the two strongest teams at the time when he was doing the recruitment. It’s a matter of ‘How were we doing things, and how are you doing things?’ What is the best way forwards? Dan often refers to: ‘Let’s have the Aston Martin way, not just do the Mercedes way, the Red Bull way.’ We’re doing what is right based on our understanding, because if you’re going to fight at the front, ultimately you can’t just do what the other teams do. You have to do your own thing.”

High-profile signings such as Fallows and Blandin are just the public face of a much wider recruitment policy to strengthen a team previously renowned, despite its momentum slowing in 2021 and 2022, for punching above its weight from headquarters that until the new factory opened in June were far from ideal – the old Jordan building and a bunch of Portakabins.

“The HQ was the old Jordan building and a bunch of Portakabins”

“A lot of the key senior people are still the same senior people,” McCullough says. “Aerodynamically they’ve changed, with Dan and Eric coming in. But the head of technical design, composites, engine systems, the chief designer, are all the same. They’ve been doing a good job for a long time.

“It’s really at a lower level that we’ve increased the capability, so we can do more studies, more analysis, make stuff quicker, start to join the lead times the bigger teams are able to operate at, so you can develop stuff for longer before you make it.”

Team principal Mike Krack – another new recruit, who joined in early 2022 from BMW Motorsport – adds: “What is really remarkable about people like Dan and Eric is they managed to get more out of the people we had. They left creative space for them – letting people develop their own solutions but guiding them. They are not the kind of people who arrive and say: ‘This is how I have done it and this is how we do it.’ But they came and they had a look at what was there and they realised there is quality in this team.”

Aston Martin has been able to make this work despite the fact that their two new aerodynamics leaders came from teams which approached the F1 rules – both pre- and post-2022 – from a very different perspective. High rake at Red Bull pre-2022 versus low-rake at Mercedes; large, heavily undercut sidepods and a rearwards-sited cockpit at Red Bull since the adoption of ground effect for 2022 versus the now-discredited zero-pod concept with a forward cockpit at Mercedes.

“You could have anticipated a clash or something like that,” Krack admits. “But it shows they are both fantastic team players. I think they have the greatest respect for each other. This is the key to start with, and they get along really well.

“They are probably not always on the same line, but they have a good way of managing and pushing a common direction. Even if they are not 100% in alignment, they find a way of showing alignment, and this has been key because it had been one of my worries to be honest when Eric joined – how are we going to do this? But it worked out because of the way they are as humans – they are very open and very driven by the team dynamic – that it was quite easy, actually.”

Aston Martin’s unexpected success in 2023 elicited a predictable response from Stroll. “The references have completely changed,” Krack says. “Lawrence being Lawrence, this is the new normal. ‘How can we get to the front?’ Lawrence is not the guy who tells us: ‘Oh, you did a good step.’ Or ‘Now we hold this and see how we move on.’ No, no. How do we get from here to where he wants to go as quickly as possible?”

This continued reassessment of what’s necessary is what led to the decision to become Honda’s factory engine partner from 2026, when new power-unit regulations are introduced. Honda’s journey to this point has rather bemused the senior people at Red Bull, who currently use their engines. After all, the company announced in October 2020 that it was pulling out of F1 at the end of 2021, citing a desire to focus its engineers on a zero-carbon future for its road cars. This led Red Bull to set up its own engine facility, which they now say they would not have done had they known Honda would change their minds two and a half years later.

As an explanation for its U-turn, Honda cited F1’s adoption in 2026 of sustainable, synthetic fuels and increase in the electrical part of the engine from about 20% of total power to 50%.

Unequal partners

Lance Stroll has consistently been outperformed by his team-mates

Honda Racing Corporation president Koji Watanabe said: “With this increase in electrical power, the key to winning in F1 will be a compact, lightweight and high-power motor with a high-performance battery that is capable of swiftly handling high power output as well as the energy-management technology. We believe this know-how gained from this new challenge has the potential to be applied directly to a future mass-production electric vehicle.”

Close watchers of F1 will see in the Honda deal the hand of yet another high-profile recruitment by Aston Martin in recent years. In September 2021, former McLaren team principal and chief executive officer Martin Whitmarsh joined as CEO of the newly established Aston Martin Performance Technologies, with oversight of F1.

Whitmarsh worked with Honda at McLaren from 1989 until 1992 alongside Ayrton Senna, and was crucial to the Japanese company’s return to the sport with McLaren in 2015. He was ousted by Dennis in a boardroom coup before the McLaren-Honda liaison was properly started.

But perhaps this was a good thing for Whitmarsh, as he cannot be held responsible for the abject failure of the McLaren-Honda partnership, a large factor in which was the institutional arrogance at McLaren that led to a complete failure to understand how far from competitiveness their car had fallen.

“Alonso fought off and then re-passed Pérez’s much faster Red Bull”

It was notable that the Aston Martin executive who flew to Japan and was involved in the announcement of the Honda partnership was Whitmarsh. The Aston Martin-Honda deal, Whitmarsh said, was “an important step for the team – both organisations share the same relentless ambition to succeed on track. It’s clear from what we’ve seen from Honda and our recent learnings they have a huge passion, they want to win, and that is our goal.”

This deal signalled, Whitmarsh confirmed, the end of Aston Martin’s relationship with Mercedes on every level.

“Mercedes have been and remain great partners for the team,” Whitmarsh says. “They are in it to win and so are we. Ultimately, there is some incompatibility in those missions. The most obvious example is we currently share a wind tunnel with them but are having to spend a huge amount of money to build our own.

“If you want to win, it means beating Mercedes, and it’s extremely difficult to beat an organisation as good as them if you’re reliant on them for intellectual property, facilities and components.”

Whitmarsh was also key in another part of Aston Martin’s success this year – the recruitment of Alonso. The Spanish driver might have won ‘only’ two world titles compared to the four of the man he replaced, but there is little doubt he has provided a significant performance upgrade. Vettel’s average qualifying advantage over Stroll in 2021 was 0.13sec, falling to 0.04sec in 2022. And he scored almost twice as many points as the Canadian last year.

Alonso, by contrast, was 0.427sec quicker over a lap than Stroll with just the Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi Grands Prix remaining in 2023, and had more than three times as many points.

This is Alonso doing what Alonso always has. The man is a force of nature. Even at 42, he remains a gold standard in getting the most from any car. Just look at some of his drives this year. None better than in Brazil, where he fought off and then re-passed Pérez’s much faster Red Bull for the team’s first podium finish since Zandvoort at the end of August.

That this performance marked the team finally seeming to get themselves back on the right track technically after a couple of months of soul-searching made it all the sweeter for all involved.

Whitmarsh likes to joke that he has hired Alonso three times, fired him once and been fired himself in the 15 years they have known each other – a reference to the Spaniard’s tumultuous year at McLaren in 2007, Whitmarsh’s dispute with Dennis, and Alonso’s return to McLaren for 2015.

And before Aston Martin signed Alonso, Whitmarsh decided he needed to sit Stroll down and explain what he would be letting himself in for.

Everything you’ve heard about him is true, Whitmarsh told his boss. He’s demanding and can be challenging to work with. But he is an exceptional driver who will raise this team’s performance to another level, and he will provide Lance with the toughest challenge he has ever had. Are you ready for that?

Stroll said he was. He wants his son to be measured against the very best. Ultimately, even if failure is not what he wants, if failure comes against a driver of the recognised quality of Alonso, he can live with that, insiders say.

This, though, brings us back to where we started, and the obvious problem with Lawrence Stroll’s ambitions. His team has made conspicuous progress over the last few years and seems to be doing all the right things as it pursues becoming a championship contender in the future.

And yet… Lance Stroll is a perfectly good F1 driver with plenty of talent – you don’t stick a Racing Point on pole in the wet in Turkey in 2020 and lead half the race if you’re not. But Alonso he is not. Nor Verstappen, nor Lewis Hamilton, Charles Leclerc, George Russell or Lando Norris.

Alonso might, as he has said, see part of his role at Aston Martin as a mentor to Stroll, but he is also – as Whitmarsh knew he would – mercilessly exposing Stroll’s weaknesses as a racing driver.

Even the times Alonso has obviously been helping Stroll – by giving him set-up advice live over the radio during the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, or dutifully sitting behind him in Spain and Austria, emphasising that they would work together and he would not attack – have indirectly confirmed his superiority.

As Aston Martin’s upgrades failed to deliver what was expected through the summer and the car became increasingly difficult to drive, Stroll found that Alonso was far more capable of taming it than he was.

“Stroll has been beaten by every team-mate apart from Sirotkin in ’18”

And Stroll’s behaviour in shoving his trainer and giving a monosyllabic, curt TV interview after being knocked out in the first qualifying session in Qatar, where he was a second slower than his team-mate, seemed to underline the pressure he was feeling.

The uncomfortable reality is that Stroll has been beaten by every driver he has been team-mates with apart from Sergey Sirotkin at Williams in 2018.

Even if Aston Martin one day has a car a second a lap faster than anyone else – which has to be considered an unlikely eventuality – Stroll would still need a team-mate. And there is little evidence to suggest he would not also be beaten by any of the drivers Aston Martin would likely sign in their quest to become world champions once Alonso moves on, whenever that may be.

And that raises another question, to which there is currently no answer. If Lawrence Stroll bought an F1 team with the aim of making his son world champion, what does he do with it once he finally realises that may be an unrealisable ambition?

Andrew Benson is BBC Sport’s chief F1 writer