Lance Stroll has rubbished claims that he could be about to ditch Formula One for a career in tennis.
It’s just under two years since rumours that Stroll might abandon Aston Martin – the Formula One team owned by his billionaire father Lawrence – to pursue a tennis career began to surface.
The claims were backed up by Sky Sports F1 pundit David Croft, who at the time said: “I have a little feeling that in about a year and a half’s time, Stroll will race his last race in F1 and go and do something else.
“I don’t think Formula One is the sport he wanted to go into when he was younger. He was a massive tennis talent, one of the best youngsters in Canada at the time.
“I just wonder if he will go off and find something that fulfils him more and brings him more excitement. I look at him sometimes and think, ‘You want to be doing something else, don’t you?’.“
Fast forward almost 24 months and Croft’s prediction hasn’t come to fruition, with Stroll still plying his trade on the tarmac and not the grass or clay courts of Wimbledon or Roland-Garros.
But the claims about Stroll haven’t gone away, with the racing driver speaking out to brandish it nonsense.
He told the Fast And The Curious podcast: “Be careful, don’t believe everything you read!
“No, I’m really not that good at tennis! Someone came up with that, I don’t really know how that started brewing.
“I mean, I always grew up playing a lot of sports, for sure. They were saying like I was going on the ATP World Tennis tour. Am I good enough to do that? No.
“Someone came up with this, I think it was Crofty [David Croft], Crofty said it. Pulled that one out of somewhere, I don’t really know where.”
Barring any last-minute changes, Stroll is expected to line up on the grid for the opening race weekend in Australia next month.
It’s set to be the Canadian’s fifth season with the constructor, but Stroll – and no doubt his mega-rich father – will be keen to finish on the podium for the first time in Aston Martin green.
He managed to break the top 10 just six times last season, but none of those finishes were above sixth.
Racing gets underway in Melbourne on Friday, 14 March.
