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The old sport adage ‘if you’re good enough, you’re old enough’ has been swung around with increasing frequency in Formula One in recent years, and Williams’ contracting of Lance Stroll promises to only prolong its prevalence.
Come the Australian Grand Prix on 27 March 2017 Lance Stroll, Formula One’s first Canadian driver since Jacques Villeneuve, will take to the grid at the tender age of 18 years and 148 days to start his first grand prix.
Stroll will be only the second youngest driver to take the start of a grand prix – obviously behind Max Verstappen’s 17-year-old 2015 debut with Toro Rosso – but with the FIA instituting regulations prohibiting sub-18-year-old drivers from obtaining a superlicence, he’s just about as young as they legally come.
But youth is increasingly the name of the game in Formula One, as is the case in all forms of elite sport. Long gone are the days of sport being merely an amateur pastime; fields and circuits and pitches occupied by part-time athletes is a distant history.
In its place is today’s hyper-professionalised world of aggressive scouting and talent farming and junior academies. Being a sportsperson is a career as all-consuming, if not more so, as any other, and given the naturally earlier retirement age of the average elite sportsperson it makes sense for an athlete to have an equally earlier debut.
Stroll has made rapid ascension through the ranks since his racing debut aged eight – in 2014 it was championship victory in Italian Formula Four, then in New Zealand’s Toyota Racing Series, and this year it was European Formula Three glory in dominating fashion.
His short but illustrious history has earned enough superlicence points – suggested in some quarters to be too high a bar in the first place – to qualify for entry to Formula One.
In Williams, never a team to shy away from taking a risk on a young driver, and alongside the experienced Valtteri Bottas, the Canadian has himself an ideal home to put his junior experience to good use.
But Stroll’s rise through the ranks has been propelled by perhaps the more significant bone of contention regarding his teenage arrival: his dad’s loaded. Really loaded.
Lawrence Stroll, uber-successful businessman most closely linked to fashion labels Michael Kors and Tommy Hilfiger, is estimated by Forbes to be in the world’s top 1000 richest individuals with a personal wealth of US$2.4 billion – a fraction of which has contributed to his son’s racing career.
But even a fraction is a significant sum, with estimates suggesting as much as US$80 million has been spent to date on Stroll Jr’s relatively short racing career. If true, it would not require too much cynicism to suggest Stroll’s value to Williams could trounce Pastor Maldonado’s reported contributions of US$70 million annually during his tenure at Grove.
Though Maldonado and Stroll are of vastly different backgrounds – the Venezuelan won just one junior championship in the five years preceding his Formula One debut – both carry with them the unsightly ‘pay driver’ tag.
But is it fair to brand Stroll’s Formula One contract as nothing more than this sort of transaction?
Many an Formula One driver brings lucrative sponsorship offers to their teams, and this has always been the case. Relative to Formula one’s growth to more than a mere enthusiast sport has been its increased reliance on cash to keep its well-heeled world turning.
Williams is a team that for its existence has straddled this divide. It has a long and illustrious history featuring some of the best drivers, but it has likewise endured the struggles of being an independent team deprived of the money required to compete wit the biggest manufacturers, who wield their political influence with impunity to win financial advantage.
Stroll is representative of the requirements burdening young Formula One hopefuls. While the sums of cash he brings are extreme, it remains that no driver can make to Formula One without having done the hard yards off the track to complement their deeds on it. Finance is and will remain part of the game.
“I come from money, I’m not going to deny that,” Stroll told reporters at his announcement. “But I believe I earned my shot in Formula One because I won every championship that I’ve competed in in single-seaters.”
Calling him a pay driver misses the point, because contributing to the team off the track as well as on it is de rigueur in Formula One, making Lance Stroll is the template – even if a slightly inflated one, if the $80 million is accurate – of the modern Formula One debutant.
Follow @MichaelLamonato on Twitter