A company in distress often begins by rearranging its own mirrors, hoping the reflection will look healthier than the balance sheet. That is where Aston Martin now finds itself.

Chairman Lawrence Stroll, the world’s poorest billionaire, presiding over a turnaround that has repeatedly failed to ignite, has engineered a peculiar financial manoeuvre: the automaker will receive £50 million from the Aston Martin F1 Team for the continued use of the Aston Martin name.

Yet the racing team already controlled those naming rights until 2055. The new agreement merely stretches that claim into perpetuity — a transaction that, to skeptical analysts, resembles less a creation of value than an accounting incantation.

This is the language of a company under strain. Since Stroll’s 2020 rescue, Aston Martin has issued multiple profit warnings, repeatedly returned to shareholders for cash, and cycled through leadership in search of a formula that remains elusive. The promise of revival — new models, new management, new strategy — has yielded instead a familiar pattern of delay and disappointment.

The burden now falls to Adrian Hallmark, the latest chief executive and former steward of Bentley, to impose discipline on a business squeezed by slowing demand in China, supply-chain fragility, and rising trade barriers in the United States.

Management points to 2026 as the year of recovery, buoyed by expected deliveries of the long-delayed Aston Martin Valhalla. But forecasts, in the modern corporate lexicon, are often acts of faith rather than evidence.

The deeper question lingers beneath the financial engineering: whether Aston Martin, diminished in market value and heavy with debt, can endure as an independent marque in an industry increasingly defined by scale, consolidation, and capital intensity.

Investors, having heard variations of this promise before, are no longer inclined to take reassurance at face value.