Aston Martin sells F1 naming rights to… Aston Martin F1
Aston Martin F1 team pays £50m so it can call itself Aston Martin F1 forever
Aston Martin is proposing to sell the rights to use the ‘Aston Martin’ name in perpetuity to AMR GP Holdings, or the Aston Martin F1 team to you and me, for £50m. It will allow Lawrence Stroll’s race team to use the iconic British manufacturer’s brand in its name, but also the chassis of the cars it makes.
The offer was made by the F1 team ahead of AML’s full year results due to be published on 25th February, which are likely to show the car company missed its projected 2025 earnings and delivered 532 fewer cars last year than in 2024 – although it did deliver 152 Valhallas during the last three months of 2025.
While some might think it strange that Aston Martin would sell the rights to name its own F1 team to itself, as the kind of business deal a Premier League football team would do by selling its own team back to itself to avoid Financial Fair Play rules, Aston Martin and the F1 team that bares its name are two very different companies.
While the road car business, Aston Martin Lagonda, is publicly owned, its largest shareholder is Lawrence Stroll via his Yew Tree Investments consortium, and his F1 team is privately owned. In 2018 Stroll led a consortium of investors to buy the bankrupt Force India F1 team, which was renamed Racing Point in 2019 before becoming the Aston Martin F1 Team in 2021 following Stroll’s takeover of the car business.
The two entities – the road car business and race team – remain separate companies, with the former currently paying a sponsorship fee in the region of £50 million a season to the latter, which is currently scheduled to run until 2040. AML did own a 4.6 per cent stake in the F1 team bearing its name, but this was sold for £110m in 2025 to Stroll’s Yew Tree consortium.
Having secured the naming rights and its stake in the team there is now clearer separation between the two entities, with only the long term sponsorship agreement remaining in place. There has been speculation in the business press that Lawrence Stroll hasn’t ruled out taking AML private, with the company’s current market cap of circa £600m considered by the Canadian businessman to be too low.
