Lance Stroll has found a neat way to clear his head during Formula 1’s April pause: go racing at night in a GT3 at Paul Ricard.
The Aston Martin driver will make his GT World Challenge Europe debut this weekend, stepping into the #18 Comtoyou Racing Aston Martin Vantage AMR GT3 Evo for the series’ opening six-hour round. He’ll share the car with Roberto Merhi and Mari Boya, and the format is about as far removed from a modern F1 weekend as you can get — a long, traffic-heavy race run almost entirely under the lights, starting at 6pm on Saturday April 11 and finishing at midnight.
For Stroll, that “different mindset” isn’t just a bit of variety. It’s also a pretty blunt admission of where Aston Martin sits right now. The team is bottom of the constructors’ standings and Stroll still hasn’t finished a grand prix in 2026. When you’re stuck in that kind of loop — weekend after weekend of resets, damage limitation and unanswered questions — the appeal of turning up to a test day, strapping into something with doors, and simply driving can be hard to resist.
He didn’t dress it up.
“This year we don’t have a very competitive car,” Stroll said, explaining that the GT outing was partly about changing things up during the break.
What’s interesting is the route he took to get there. Stroll confirmed he spoke to Max Verstappen before committing to the programme, tapping into the Dutchman’s growing involvement in GT racing.
“We talked about whom to contact, and since he’s already involved in GT racing, we discussed it a bit,” Stroll said. “Everyone enjoys driving GT3 cars — they’re fun.”
That’s as close as you’ll get to drivers openly comparing notes across disciplines in the middle of a championship campaign — and it underlines how normalised GT racing has become in the current paddock culture. It’s no longer treated as a curiosity or a retirement plan. For top-level drivers, GT3 has become a legitimate outlet: different pressures, different skills, and a refreshing absence of the political noise that can swallow an F1 season when results aren’t coming.
Verstappen, of course, won’t be driving at Paul Ricard, but his team will be present. He’s due to be in action later this month in 24 Hours of Nürburgring qualifying, partnering Lucas Auer. Stroll’s move, then, doesn’t feel like a random dabble — it’s part of a wider trend of F1 drivers keeping their racing sharp in environments that are intense in a different way.
And make no mistake: a six-hour night race isn’t a gentle Sunday drive. You’re dealing with tyre management over long stints, slower-class traffic, changing track conditions, and the kind of concentration that can evaporate quickly when you’ve been staring into a cone of headlight glare for hours. If Stroll wanted something that demands total engagement — rather than the stop-start frustration of an uncompetitive F1 package — he’s picked the right place.
Stroll’s also not new to endurance racing. He’s previously competed in the 24 Hours of Daytona in 2016 and 2018, and he’s been clear that those experiences stuck with him.
“I really enjoyed racing the 24 Hours of Daytona. It’s a race I truly loved,” he said.
None of this fixes Aston Martin’s immediate problem, of course. The F1 season resumes in Miami at the start of May, and whatever the team finds between now and then needs to translate into something tangible on track. Stroll suggested after Suzuka that the current performance woes are a “combination” of the AMR26 chassis and the Honda power unit — a telling phrasing, because it spreads the responsibility across the whole package rather than pointing to a single culprit.
But this weekend isn’t about Miami, or upgrades, or even optics. It reads like a driver trying to reclaim a bit of agency in a season where too much has happened *to* him, rather than *because* of him. In a GT3 car, there’s no radio debate over strategy priorities, no politics over development direction, no existential post-session debriefs. You share the work, you manage the stints, and if you’re quick and clean, you see the result on the timing screen.
For a driver still searching for his first grand prix finish of 2026, that’s probably exactly the point.
