Lance Stroll: The Underrated Talent in Formula 1

Pedro de la Rosa has spent enough years buried in Formula 1 data traces to know when the numbers don’t quite match the narrative. And on Lance Stroll, the Aston Martin ambassador is adamant: the sport is sleeping on him.

On paper, the comparison with Fernando Alonso is brutal. Since they became team-mates in 2023, Alonso has outqualified Stroll 89-15 and outscored him 335 points to 131. Even now, with Alonso at 45 and Stroll entering what should be his peak, the Spaniard still holds an average qualifying edge of around three tenths in 2026.

Those are the headline figures. De la Rosa prefers to look underneath.

“Lance is super fast,” he said on the Beyond The Grid podcast, leaning on what he knows best – the data. He studies where each driver gains and loses time, corner by corner, lap by lap. In that raw analysis, Stroll doesn’t look like a perennial number two.

“In many circuits, in many corners, he’s unbeatable,” de la Rosa insisted. This isn’t a case of a neat split where one driver dominates high-speed and the other tidies up the rest. “They’re both very evenly matched.”

That assessment jars with the scoreboard but not, de la Rosa argues, with the stopwatch. Stroll, he says, is “extremely quick in all types of corners.” The problem lies not in peak speed, but in the way a weekend comes together – or doesn’t.

Too often, small errors in qualifying, a scruffy lap, a missed detail, leave Stroll 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 he does, the picture changes. There have been Saturdays when Stroll has put the Aston Martin ahead of Alonso on the grid. Those days matter to de la Rosa, because of who sits on the other side of the garage. “He outqualifies Fernando, which is like… I mean, we’re talking about Fernando Alonso, you know.”

Race day tells a similar story in his eyes. Stroll’s pace over a stint and his feel for tyre management draw praise as well. The Canadian has always been regarded as solid on Sundays; de la Rosa goes further, calling his race pace “impressive” and highlighting how well he looks after the tyres.

There is, though, a clear condition attached to this defence. For Stroll to run at Alonso’s level, the car has to give him a fair platform.

“I think Lance is a very underrated driver,” de la Rosa said. The current Aston Martin, he argues, is a handful. “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’s the crux of his belief: a more compliant, more predictable Aston Martin would reveal a very different version of Stroll to the one defined by the cold numbers of qualifying tallies and points gaps.

For now, the stats paint one picture, the data traces another. If Aston Martin can finally tame the car beneath them, the answer to which one truly reflects Lance Stroll may not stay theoretical for long.