Four days before we recently sat down with him, Lawrence Stroll delivered two press conferences in a day. That’s not uncommon for a billionaire in the public eye with multiple business interests, yet these two press conferences were continents apart.
At 11am Tokyo time, he announced a new engine supply deal with Honda for his Aston Martin Formula 1 team, a deal he hopes will enable Aston Martin to challenge for championships.
As soon as that was done, he got in his private jet and headed back west, to Monaco. Seventeen hours later, Stroll had landed back in Nice, headed to his yacht to take a shower and then on to the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc to unveil the new DB12 road car to the world. How do you spend your Wednesdays?
The day after we spoke, his F1 team were set to move into a new factory at Silverstone he’s funded, and in the interim, there was the small matter of the Monaco Grand Prix, where one of his cars was starting on the front row. We walked into his office at just before 13.15hr, the race due to start at 15.00hr.
Stroll was rather obviously a busy man. With all this in mind, I wasn’t expecting the most newsworthy audience with someone who’d have more than one eye on the clock, with his next diary appointment being of that magnitude; a hello and a handshake, perhaps. But no: the audience lasted almost 45 minutes and the Stroll I thought I knew was very different from the one who was in front of me.
Anyone who’s seen Stroll on Netflix’s Drive to Survive will see a man edited to be a bit bolshy, of few words and quite scary. In person, he’s anything but. While not a man I’d fancy dinging the car door of in the Waitrose car park (or perhaps yacht of in the Monaco harbour), he’s a great storyteller and a very clear speaker, deliberate with words but eminently quotable in almost everything he says. He’ll dominate a room but not feel imposing with it, and he’s a surprisingly rare commodity for an interviewer: he’ll answer the question you’ve asked and not try to spin a pre-rehearsed line or stick to the company message. I liked him.
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