Pedro de la Rosa has thrown his weight firmly behind Lance Stroll, insisting the Canadian has the raw speed to live with one of Formula 1’s fiercest competitors: Fernando Alonso.
On paper, that sounds like a stretch. Since they became team-mates at Aston Martin in 2023, the numbers have been brutal. Alonso leads the qualifying head-to-head 89–15. He’s scored 335 points to Stroll’s 131. Even in 2026, with Alonso at 45 and Stroll deeper into his prime, the Spaniard still averages around three tenths quicker in qualifying.
Yet de la Rosa, Aston Martin ambassador and a man who has spent a career buried in data traces and telemetry overlays, sees something the raw stats don’t shout.
“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 not the usual PR gloss. De la Rosa drilled into the detail. This isn’t a case of Stroll being a specialist in one area and Alonso in another.
“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 issue, in his eyes, is not the outright pace. It’s the stitching together of a full lap when it matters most.
“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. That's where he's missing, you know, it's just sometimes putting everything together in quali.”
That inconsistency is what fans remember. The data, de la Rosa insists, tells a more nuanced story. When Stroll does hook it up, the benchmark in the other garage suddenly looks a little more human.
“Sometimes he gets it in quali and he outqualifies Fernando, which is like... I mean, we're talking about Fernando Alonso, you know.”
Race day is another area where de la Rosa believes Stroll deserves more credit. Once the lights go out and the field settles into long runs, the Canadian’s feel for tyres and rhythm comes to the fore.
“In races, his race pace is impressive as well. He's very good managing tyres.”
There is, however, a clear condition attached to this praise. De la Rosa doesn’t shy away from it. For Stroll to show his best, the car has to give him something back.
“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.”
It’s a revealing line. Inside Aston Martin, there is an acceptance that the current package is tricky, both mechanically and in terms of power unit driveability. In that environment, Alonso’s experience and adaptability shine. Stroll, de la Rosa argues, needs the machinery to meet him halfway.
The claim is bold: “as quick as Fernando” when the car behaves. The evidence, at least from the timing sheets, still has work to do to catch up. But if Aston Martin can tame its car, the next phase of this team-mate battle will show whether de la Rosa’s faith in Stroll is loyalty, or a glimpse of a level the wider paddock has yet to fully see.
