Stroll’s return to GT was a nightmare: he finished 48th with 8 minutes of penalties

Saturday to forget The return to the track with the GT cars for Lance Stroll couldn’t have gone worse, taking part in the 6 hours of Paul Ricard on Saturday, the first race of the GT World Challenge Europe 2026 calendar. The Canadian raced at the wheel of the Aston Martin Vantage AMR GT3 EVO of the Comtoyou Racing team together with Roberto Merhi and Mari Boya; the trio, however, closed the race in a disastrous 48th position, 13 laps behind the winners of the race, who were none other than their teammates Mattia Drudi, Marco Sorensen, Nicki Thiim in the second car of the Comtoyou team. In qualifying the trio ‘led’ by Stroll had achieved a less than exciting 15th time, while in the race the situation worsened following an endless sequence of penalties collected by car #18. Overall the penalties came to a total of eight minutes and 25 seconds; Specifically, Stroll was directly responsible for a one minute penalty for failing to respect the blue flags and a further minute and 55 seconds fine for exceeding track limits. The only consolation for Stroll were the times shown in some laps of his stints, which were among the fastest of the race. Definitely too little, however, to consider this return to GT racing satisfactory, which had not seen him as a protagonist since 2018. The results of the other ‘big names’. However, things went better for Max Verstappen’s team who, despite without the Dutchman at the wheel – the four-time F1 world champion was still present in the pits to observe his teammates – finished the race in ninth place. Finally, 12th place for Valentino Rossi’s crew, who shared the cockpit with Daniel Harper and Max Hesse.