Lance Stroll's True Speed Revealed by Pedro de la Rosa
Pedro de la Rosa has spent enough years buried in telemetry traces to know when a driver is quick – and he insists Lance Stroll is a lot quicker than the numbers suggest.
On paper, the comparison with Fernando Alonso is brutal. Since the two became Aston Martin team-mates in 2023, Alonso has outqualified Stroll 89-15 and outscored him 335 points 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.
Yet de la Rosa, now Aston Martin’s ambassador and a long-time data devotee, sees a very different picture when he dives into the details.
“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 last word hangs in the air. Unbeatable. Not just competitive, not just close.
De la Rosa rejects the easy narrative that splits the pair into convenient boxes – Alonso the all-rounder, Stroll the specialist.
“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 raw pace, de la Rosa argues, is there. The problem lies in stitching it together 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,” he said. “That's where he's missing, you know, it's just sometimes putting everything together in quali.”
Every so often, though, it clicks. The lap comes together, the car behaves, and the timing screens tell a different story.
“But sometimes he gets it in quali and he outqualifies Fernando, which is like... I mean, we're talking about Fernando Alonso, you know.”
For any driver on the grid, outpacing a two-time world champion in equal machinery is a statement. For Stroll, whose reputation has long been tangled up with questions about his route into F1 and his father’s ownership of the team, it becomes a lightning rod.
De la Rosa insists the Canadian is not just a one-lap threat either.
“In races, his race pace is impressive as well. He's very good managing tyres,” he said, pointing to one of the key currencies of modern Formula 1 – the ability to stretch stints, protect rubber and still attack when it counts.
There is, however, a major condition attached to all this praise.
“I think Lance is a very underrated driver,” de la Rosa 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 caveat cuts to the heart of Aston Martin’s wider struggle. The team knows it has one of the most complete drivers of the era in Alonso. It believes it has a far sharper Stroll than the stats column implies. But the current package, by de la Rosa’s own admission, is “very difficult” – a car that asks too much of its drivers and gives too little back.
On Fridays at circuits like Barcelona, the photos show two green cars carving similar lines, two drivers leaning on the same limits. Inside the garage, the data traces tell de la Rosa that, on the right day with the right balance, Stroll can run at Alonso’s speed.
The question now is simple and unforgiving: can Aston Martin give him that car often enough for the rest of the paddock to see it too?
