Pedro de la Rosa Defends Lance Stroll's Speed Against Alonso

Pedro de la Rosa has launched a firm defence of Lance Stroll, insisting the Canadian has the raw speed to live with one of Formula 1’s greats – Fernando Alonso – when the car gives him a fair shot.

On paper, that sounds like a bold claim. Since they became team-mates at Aston Martin in 2023, the numbers have been brutal. Alonso leads the qualifying head-to-head 89-15 and has more than doubled Stroll’s points tally, 335 to 131. Even in 2026, with Alonso at 45 and Stroll deep into his F1 career, the Spaniard still holds an average qualifying edge of around three tenths of a second.

De la Rosa, though, has spent enough time inside the team and inside the data to see a different layer.

“Lance is super fast,” the Aston Martin ambassador said on the Beyond The Grid podcast. A former F1 racer himself, he leans heavily on telemetry, not reputation. “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 polite praise for a team-mate’s son. De la Rosa went further, rejecting the easy narrative that Alonso and Stroll split their strengths across different types of corners.

“It's not like you can say Lance is fast in high-speed, Fernando in… They're both very evenly matched,” he said. “Lance is extremely quick in all types of corners.”

The problem, as Aston Martin’s long-time tester sees it, lies not in peak pace but in execution when it matters most. Stroll’s Saturdays have too often been punctured by small but costly errors.

“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 explained. “That's where he's missing, you know, it's just sometimes putting everything together in quali.”

When he does, the picture changes. Stroll has outqualified Alonso on occasion, a point de la Rosa underlined with a hint of disbelief at how little credit that brings.

“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, de la Rosa argues, is another area where Stroll’s reputation lags behind his performance. Away from the spotlight of qualifying, his long-run pace and tyre management often stack up well against Alonso’s.

“In races, his race pace is impressive as well. He's very good managing tyres,” he said.

There is, however, a significant caveat. De la Rosa believes Stroll’s ceiling appears only when the machinery underneath him behaves as it should. In a tricky, temperamental car, the gap to Alonso can stretch.

“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 striking endorsement from a man who has seen both drivers up close on the Aston Martin screens. The numbers still tell one story. De la Rosa is adamant the stopwatch, in the right conditions, can tell another.