Lance Stroll's Potential: Insights from Pedro de la Rosa

Pedro de la Rosa has thrown his full weight behind Lance Stroll, insisting the Canadian has the raw speed to live with one of Formula 1’s greats – Fernando Alonso – when the machinery allows it.

On paper, that sounds like a stretch. Since the pair became Aston Martin team-mates in 2023, the numbers have been brutal. Alonso leads their qualifying head-to-head 89-15 and has more than doubled Stroll’s points tally, 335 to 131. Even in 2026, with Alonso now 45 and Stroll in his prime at 27, the Spaniard still holds an average qualifying edge of around three tenths of a second.

Yet de la Rosa, Aston Martin ambassador and former F1 racer, sees a very different picture when he dives into the data.

“Lance is super fast,” he said on the Beyond The Grid podcast. A self-confessed data obsessive, de la Rosa explained that Stroll’s speed often lights up the traces. “I like to see where one driver is faster than the other. And Lance, in many circuits, in many corners, is unbeatable.”

That is not the usual polite defence of a struggling team-mate. De la Rosa pushed the idea that there is no neat split between the two Aston Martin drivers in terms of strengths.

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

So why the gulf in results? De la Rosa pointed the finger not at talent, but at execution in the moments that set up a weekend.

He highlighted qualifying as the key weakness. Stroll, he argued, has the speed but too often scatters it with errors or small missteps that leave him mired in the pack. “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… sometimes putting everything together in quali.”

When Stroll does hook it up, de la Rosa stressed, the Canadian is capable of beating Alonso outright on Saturdays – no small feat given the two-time world champion’s reputation as one of the fiercest competitors on the grid. “Sometimes he gets it in quali and he outqualifies Fernando, which is like... I mean, we're talking about Fernando Alonso, you know.”

De la Rosa also moved to defend Stroll’s race-day credentials, an area where the perception is often kinder but still overshadowed by Alonso’s relentless consistency. “In races, his race pace is impressive as well. He's very good managing tyres,” he said, underlining that the Canadian’s long-run speed and tyre care match the sport’s elite when conditions fall his way.

There is, though, a clear caveat in de la Rosa’s assessment – and it is a big one. In his view, Stroll’s performance level is tightly linked to how benign and predictable the Aston Martin package feels.

“I think Lance is a very underrated driver,” he continued. The Spaniard then turned the spotlight onto the car rather than the driver. He described the current Aston Martin as “a very difficult car” to handle, pointing to issues not just with the chassis but also with the power unit’s driveability.

“When we improve the car and make it a bit more driver-friendly… whenever the car is driving properly, he's as quick as Fernando. There's no question about that.”

It is a bold statement from someone embedded within the team, and one that cuts against the harsh statistics that define the Alonso–Stroll partnership so far. The numbers say one thing. The data traces, and de la Rosa’s faith, insist there is a far closer fight hidden beneath.

If Aston Martin can finally deliver the calm, compliant car he describes, the onus will fall squarely on Stroll to prove that the version of him living in the telemetry can finally step out into the points table.