Pedro de la Rosa Backs Lance Stroll's Potential Against Fernando Alonso
Pedro de la Rosa has gone firmly to bat for Lance Stroll, insisting the Canadian can be every bit as fast as Aston Martin team-mate Fernando Alonso when the machinery allows it.
On paper, that sounds like a bold claim. Since they were paired in 2023, Alonso has dominated the head-to-head numbers: 89-15 in qualifying, 335 points to 131 in races, and an average advantage of three tenths of a second over a single lap in 2026. One-way traffic, by any conventional reading.
De la Rosa, Aston Martin’s Formula 1 ambassador and a man who has spent decades buried in telemetry traces, sees something different.
“Lance is super fast,” he said on the Beyond The Grid podcast. “I love to watch data because I'm data-driven. And I like to see where one driver is faster than the other. And Lance, in many circuits, in many corners, is unbeatable.”
That’s the key line. Not “good”, not “solid”. Unbeatable.
De la Rosa pushed back against the easy narrative that neatly divides the two drivers into specialist boxes.
“It's not like you can say Lance is fast in high-speed, Fernando in... They're both very evenly matched,” he explained. “Lance is extremely quick in all types of corners.”
The problem, as he sees it, is not raw speed. It’s the stitching together of a weekend.
Stroll’s qualifying record tells that story. Errors at crucial moments, scruffy laps, or small missteps under pressure have repeatedly left him mired in the pack. Once that happens, the whole grand prix tends to unravel.
“Sometimes he's had some mistakes in qualifying or little things that then eventually if you don't qualify up there, it just compromises the whole weekend,” de la Rosa said. “That's where he's missing, you know, it's just sometimes putting everything together in quali.”
And yet, when it does click, the benchmark is as high as it gets.
“But sometimes he gets it in quali and he outqualifies Fernando, which is like... I mean, we're talking about Fernando Alonso, you know.”
Beating a two-time world champion on a Saturday is no trivial feat, even on isolated days. De la Rosa stressed that Stroll’s strengths aren’t confined to one-lap bursts either.
“And in races, his race pace is impressive as well. He's very good managing tyres.”
There is, though, a major condition attached to this praise. In de la Rosa’s view, Stroll’s performances are tightly linked to how cooperative the Aston Martin is on any given weekend.
“I think Lance is a very underrated driver,” he continued. “When we improve the car and make it a bit more driver-friendly – I must say it's a very difficult car right now for many reasons, not only car, chassis, but also on the engine, we have to make improvements on driveability – whenever the car is driving properly, he's as quick as Fernando. There's no question about that.”
That comment lifts the curtain slightly on Aston Martin’s current technical frustrations: a tricky chassis, an engine that needs smoother driveability, and a package that demands perfection from its drivers. In that environment, Alonso’s experience and adaptability naturally shine. De la Rosa’s argument is that once the car stops fighting its drivers, Stroll’s underlying speed will look far less theoretical.
For now, the numbers say one thing, the data traces another. If Aston Martin do tame the car, the next question becomes unavoidable: can Stroll turn those flashes of “unbeatable” into a season-long standard alongside one of the sport’s toughest yardsticks?
