Home comforts help Stroll’s growing pains
Canadian slams haters and ‘rich kid’ claims Villeneuve says teenager has mountain to climb
Lance Stroll returned this week to the place where it all began, a karting track in back-country Quebec, wrestling with about the only machines he could use until he passed his driving test. For a few hours he had a smile as wide as Montreal’s St Lawrence River, the growing pains of his debut Formula One campaign forgotten as the teenager savoured a few home comforts.
Little is expected of the local boy in tomorrow’s Canadian Grand Prix, given his failure to secure a point for Williams in his first six races, but his mere presence at 18 in the highest echelon of motorsport offers a compelling parable on the blurred lines between talent and wealth.
Few dispute that Stroll is a gifted young driver: he is a European Formula Three champion and finds himself plunged into F1 at an age when his peers’ best hope of experiencing such a rush is on a Play- Station. While Max Verstappen, who joined Toro Rosso at 17, set a fresh standard for precocity, Stroll’s improbable youth was reflected in the fact that Williams could not announce his arrival until his 18th birthday, due to their sponsorship by alcohol brand Martini.
The sticking point is that Stroll’s warp-speed journey has been cushioned by the £1.8billion fortune of his father Lawrence, a fashion entrepreneur and among the richest men in Canada, courtesy of his investment in Tommy Hilfiger and Michael Kors. Stroll Snr, an avid accumulator of Ferraris, wasted little time in securing for his son the most gilded path money could buy.
One account has it that he appointed Luca Baldisserri, of Ferrari, to supervise Lance’s rise, putting together a globe-girdling testing programme in a 2014 Williams, where he had access to an entourage of 20, as well as five engineers and two engines specially configured by Mercedes.
This is hardly the average lot of a neophyte trying to find his way. As Pat Symonds, Williams’s former chief technical officer, puts it: “The last rookie with that many kilometres of testing for his debut was Jacques Villeneuve.”
Villeneuve, of course, had august ancestry of his own, as son of the late Ferrari legend Gilles. But he arrived in F1 with serious credentials, having won the Indy 500, and claimed the world title at his second attempt. Stroll shows little sign of being cut from the same cloth.
Stroll sighed when asked about perceptions that he was here purely because of family money. “Never heard that question before,” he said, sarcastically. “Drivers can’t just buy their way into F1, you have to go out and get the results. There are always going to be haters, there’s always going to be jealousy. When you win, it’s expected, and when you lose, people knock you down. But I don’t focus on that. I know who is important around me, and those are the people I listen to – the rest is just noise.”
It was a poised piece of self-defence, but for his assertion that an F1 ticket cannot merely be bought. Several of Stroll’s peers owe their livelihoods to the flashing dollar signs that made them more attractive to their teams.
Villeneuve predicts the constant attention on how Stroll is bankrolled could prove a millstone around his neck. “Definitely Lance will have to prove himself even more and he knows that,” he said. “It is just a general attitude that if you have money, you cannot have talent, but that is not true.”