Aston Martin filings point to a big bump in Lance Stroll’s 2024 pay — with the usual F1 caveats
Aston Martin’s latest UK company accounts have handed us a rare peek behind the curtain of an F1 driver deal, and the headline number attached to Lance Stroll is hard to miss.
Buried in the related-party disclosure is a payment of $12.3 million to Golden Eagle Racing Ltd — the company that handles Stroll’s racing activities — for the 2024 season. That’s up sharply from $5.608 million the year before. The disclosure is required because Stroll is an immediate family member of a named director of AMR GP (his father, Lawrence Stroll, appears in the filing under his legal name, L S Strulovich).
Before anyone slaps a “Stroll earns $12.3m” sticker on it, some context. That figure covers the “provision of services,” a catch-all that typically includes not only the driver’s fee but also the costs of the people who keep the show on the road: management, trainer, physio, performance consultants, the lot. In other words, it’s the gross to the company, not necessarily Lance’s personal take-home.
Still, the direction of travel is clear. The 2024 renegotiation lifted Stroll’s terms, bringing him closer to peers of similar experience and — crucially for Aston Martin — stability alongside Fernando Alonso into 2025. Per the filing, the team also received $500,000 in sponsorship income from Stroll’s racing company, an unsurprising internal loop given the structure of modern F1 commercial deals.
There’s also a small perk tucked in the paperwork: under the sponsorship agreement between AMR GP and Aston Martin Lagonda, both drivers get one fleet car free of charge “for the life of the contract.” It’s a line that won’t move a balance sheet, but it’s the kind of fringe benefit that lives in footnotes rather than press releases. Alonso’s specific remuneration isn’t disclosed in the same way — he isn’t related to company directors, so the related-party rules don’t apply.
So where would that headline $12.3m put Stroll if you took it at face value? Middle of the pack, roughly. Media estimates peg the top end of the grid — think Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton and Lando Norris — in a different postcode entirely, with the sport’s biggest stars earning multiples of that figure. But salary tables in F1 are always a movable feast. They’re a blend of reported numbers, educated guesses and creative accounting structures that vary wildly from driver to driver.
What’s not in dispute is the visibility this filing gives us into a corner of F1 we rarely see. Most driver deals are locked away behind NDAs and holding companies; Aston Martin’s is unusual only because of the family connection that forces daylight onto the arrangement. It doesn’t reveal Stroll’s exact paycheck — no set of accounts will — but it does underline his upgraded status within the team after 2024 and the value Aston places on continuity with its 2025 line-up of Alonso and Stroll.
If you’re looking for a grand conclusion, here it is: the number’s real, the nuance matters, and the truth sits somewhere between those lines on the Companies House PDF. In F1, that’s about as clear as it gets.
