Pedro de la Rosa’s Formula One career saw him take part in over 100 Grands Prix, with him achieving a point on his debut and a podium for McLaren at the 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix.
A veteran of the sport, and a trusted pair of hands at the wheel as a test driver, the Spaniard has a wealth of knowledge and some great stories to tell, with him imparting some of that experience onto the Aston Martin team, where he is currently acting in an ambassadorial role.
Motorsport Week caught up with the former Arrows, Jaguar, and McLaren driver to look back on his life in racing, and some of the key moments that defined it – starting with an unorthodox beginning of racing remote-controlled cars…
“Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to go karting,” De la Rosa tells us. “I wanted to race in karting, but my father didn’t want me to get involved in motor racing mainly because he was afraid of me having an accident.
“His brother died in a road traffic accident so after that my father was not so keen on motor racing and he said, ‘Ok, I’m not going to race anymore and I’m not having any of my kids racing.’
“So then he said to me, ‘Look, if you want to go racing, the only thing that I allow you to do is radio control cars.’ So I said, ‘Well let’s go for it,’ and that’s how it all started.
“I was nine years old and we started racing in Spain and eventually I won the Spanish championship and the European championship, and then came second in the World Championship.
“There were a lot of years of testing, racing, travelling with my father and my brother, it was a fantastic but it got to a point where I just felt it was boring and I wanted to go karting and that’s when my father eventually said ‘ok.’
“Once I started karting, it was always a fight with my father because he never really wanted me to go into single-seaters.
“The Spanish Federation were doing a scholarship with the young Spanish drivers and they did some tests in Jarama with single-seaters and they did like a selection and I won the prize, the scholarship.
“My father called the Spanish Federation and said, ‘Give it to another kid because I won’t allow him to [drive.]’
“So I said to my father, “Why did you do that?’ I mean it’s incredible that I won the scholarship and he called to say no. And then the Spanish Federation told him, do you know that your son won the prize by a big margin to the second driver and that made him think.
“He said [to me], ‘Ok you go into single-seaters, I allow you to, but don’t ask for money, don’t ask for my help because I won’t be able to help you.’
“Every year was difficult because I never knew what was going to happen. And that’s why I always look at parents that come for advice and I say don’t look mid to long term because if you look at the career of your child on a mid to long term basis you will never continue.
“You have to live year on year and then expect to win the championship and have something magic happen. If you don’t win the championship, nothing magic will happen and that’s the story of my life. I always managed to win the championships that I was racing in maybe in the second year. So therefore that allowed me to get into F1.
“It was not easy, but I was lucky enough to win every category.”
Most F1 drivers will have started karting from a very young age, and clearly De la Rosa was very late to that particular party. It begs the question, then, whether he felt that delay in getting into single-seaters set him back at all – even if he did still make it to F1.
“I always think that if I had started earlier, I would have been a more complete driver,” he admitted. “I have no doubt about that.
“However, I was lucky to get involved in racing through radio control cars, which in a way is different, but it also allows you to get a very good understanding of what a car needs to be fast because you have to sense the grip from far away.
“It is a lot more difficult to set up a car in the distance with a radio control remote than when you are sitting in the car. So that helped me develop my feeling of what the car was doing in a very precise way. And also the amount of hours that it took us to perfect the car, the tyres.
“So driving, competing, travelling, in a way it’s similar to karting as well and I think I picked up very good things from radio control cars, but it’s still radio control cars. I wish I had started [karting] earlier.”
De la Rosa still made it to F1, of course, and scored a point on his debut in Australia in 1999 for Arrows as he finished sixth. We asked him to reflect on that moment.
“It was incredible to finish that race and some miracle,” he addressed. “We had done some Grand Prix simulation and we never finished one!
“We arrived to Australia and we finished with both cars. I finished P6, which was incredible. We got a point. And then I remember exactly that day I was having dinner in the Grand Hotel in Melbourne with my wife and I said to her ‘Formula One is easy! Everyone is saying how difficult it is, but my first race, I’m in P6 with the Arrows. It’s not that difficult.’
“And how wrong I was! After that it was a disaster the whole season. We hardly finished any more races and you learn the hard way. But that’s Formula One.
“The problem is when you get to Formula One, you arrive having won. I mean every driver has won most of the [feeder] categories, otherwise you don’t make it, and you arrive full of confidence and belief that you can make the difference.
“But once you’re in Formula One, you realise if you don’t have the team, forget it. You realise then how important the team is and how key it is to have a competitive car.”
During his time at Arrows, De la Rosa was paired with Jos Verstappen, father of a certain now three-time world champion Max.
When the pair were team-mates, the younger Verstappen would have been a very young child, and the Spaniard recalled some of his experiences of meeting the now dominant force in F1 back then.
“I remember some races that Jos brought Max to. I remember especially in 2000 in Nurburgring, Max was in the team garage and then having dinner in the hotel. We were sitting at different tables and Max came to us and he was playing with us, he was four years old, something like that. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, my team-mate has a kid how can this happen?’
“Because I, in that time, thought that to be World Champion you couldn’t have a kid. I was a bit old-fashioned in that way and that’s what I thought.
“When I was looking at Max, I never thought that he could be potentially a World Champion or anything like that. 10 years after he was karting and he was winning and I remember the people in the paddock saying how quick Max was already.
“I remember meeting Jos in Barcelona at a Grand Prix. He was there in the paddock and I said, ‘I’ve heard that your son Max is really, really good’ and he said to me, ‘Yeah, he’s good, but let’s wait and see, you know how this sport is.’
“He never spoke highly about Max or gave him hype. He was very down to Earth and I thought, ‘Ok, well he didn’t sound too excited about the speed of his son,’ but actually he was just trying to manage expectations.”
Back to De la Rosa’s career and after a spell at Arrows he joined Jaguar. The team had great promise, carrying one of the biggest automotive names in the world, and they’d eventually become the all-conquering Red Bull team but, during the Spaniard’s spell with them, it was a case of what might have been.
“I look back with sadness really because the whole project was fantastic,” he conceded. “It looked like we had the budget, we had the opportunity.
“But the team was not prepared to have the green car. I think I always say that the biggest issue was having the whole team painted in green, with the Jaguar logo, because the team didn’t have the structure, didn’t have the wind tunnel, didn’t have the tools really to be a works team. And that’s what cost us the opportunity.
“We didn’t have a quick car. We were growing, we needed more time and I always look back with sadness because I always thought that there were some strategic mistakes that cost us the opportunity of growing the huge potential that the team had.
“I had the feeling that it was the team to be. We were so close to signing Adrian Newey and he came [soon after to Red Bull.] We were so close to doing something special, but Adrian didn’t come, there was no time really to invest in the wind tunnel. We used to have to use a wind tunnel in the United States so every two weeks, our aerodynamicists left and they would be working there and then come back.
“There was huge potential, but we never had the time really to build on those expectations. But as I’ve said, the biggest issue was painting the car green when we were not prepared for that.”
From Jaguar, De la Rosa went on to experience being part of a team where a culture of winning was well-established, McLaren, where he became largely a test driver.
“I enjoyed my time at McLaren massively,” he enthuses, “because I became a much more complete driver thanks to all the work I did with the team in the simulator. They were the first team that they were really investing and believing in the simulation.
“So I learned a lot and I realised how far off we were at Jaguar of achieving anything because I realised the amount of investment that had to be done in Formula One to become competitive.
“I always regretted not going to Jaguar after my McLaren years because I was so much stronger. I could have helped the team so much more but the timing was wrong. I was too immature in a way to be at Jaguar because there were things that, with my experience at McLaren, would have helped more.
“In a way that’s what I was expecting from Eddie [Irvine, team-mate at Jaguar] because he was coming from Ferrari. He was second in the World Championship [in 1999] and I didn’t understand after that, that he didn’t point out what we were not doing. It was so obvious after being at McLaren, I thought there’s no way on Earth that Jaguar will eventually win.
“So it was sad in a way, but I had a great time at McLaren. I met incredible engineers, people, mechanics, friends, drivers, and I had the opportunity as well to work with with Fernando [Alonso,] with Lewis [Hamilton,] two of the best drivers in the history of F1 together in the same team and I had the opportunity to work with them.
“I look back and, for example, before the season started in Bahrain for the test in 2007 I remember that we had two cars. It was Lewis and Fernando but we were testing so many days in a row that sometimes they got tired.
“So they said to me ‘Tomorrow you will drive the car,’ so I was comparing myself with Lewis and Fernando every morning and that was so fulfilling. It was really a great experience.”
Bar a spell in 2006 where he stood in for Juan Pablo Montoya, though, De la Rosa never earned a full-time race seat for the Woking-based team.
It was close in 2008 but Heikki Kovalainen beat him to the drive, ahead of a year that of course famously saw Hamilton win the Drivers’ World title for the outfit.
Indeed, it’s something the Spaniard still thinks about now, with the car clearly very quick:
“I haven’t recovered! I thought I did a good job in 2006. I mean, you see drivers that have been here for 100, 200 Grands Prix and they haven’t achieved a podium and they’re still here and they’re fantastic drivers. But in my short spell at McLaren I already achieved one podium, and a fastest lap.
“So whenever I had the opportunity, I think I did well and I feel comfortable with that.
“I wish I would have had the 2008 drive alongside Lewis for many reasons because I was peaking in my Formula One career.
“I had the experience, I had been working with that team for ages and I just felt strong at that moment, very strong. Even if I would have been facing one of the best in history in Lewis I was not afraid because I knew that he was very fast but the team decided to take Heikki and that was that.
“I was so close because Ron [Dennis] kept telling me it would be me but in the last moment they decided for Heikki. Heikki became available for whatever reason and they took him.
“So it was their team decision and I stayed in the team, I didn’t leave. I wanted to leave at one point because I knew from that moment that if I wanted to go back racing, it would not be with McLaren because I knew if they hadn’t taken me at that point, they would not take me ever again.
“So that’s why after that I went to Sauber and then into HRT because the relationship was different between McLaren and myself from then on.”
The highlight of his time at McLaren, and probably his entire racing career, was the podium he achieved at the 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix, a chaotic race that saw Jenson Button win his first-ever F1 GP from 14th on the grid.
Naturally, a hugely proud moment for the Briton, but also the stand-in McLaren driver who was alongside him in De la Rosa.
“I qualified P4, which was really good,” Pedro recalls. “We had a fantastic car that year. It was still an Adrian Newey car, but the V8 Mercedes engine was very poor.
“In fact, I think we had one of the best cars out there, but the engine was really down on power but we got to Hungary and we were very competitive with hardly any straights so we were good. I knew I had a strong chance of being on the podium the next morning.
“I remember waking up on a Sunday looking out of the window and it was raining. And I thought ‘f***, I don’t want rain today because I’m at the front!’ I just wanted a boring dry race where I could go for a podium. We started and it was wet and it was a difficult race and we made some strategic mistakes. We should have won but we were beaten by Jenson.
“Honestly, I don’t really care, the most important thing is that I was on the podium and sometimes I even forget I finished second. Sometimes I explain that I finished third and my wife sometimes says, ‘No, you finished second.’ For me, the important thing is that I was in the [top three] photograph and I take that with me forever.
“I remember every detail of the race, every moment, every radio communication, every moment after the race and how the team celebrated with me. It was a really special moment.”
In the closing stages of De la Rosa’s racing career, meanwhile, he joined new team HRT.
Part of a crop of three teams that joined the sport in 2010, their time in F1 was short-lived thanks to budget constraints, but the Spaniard still looks back on that time fondly, and how he could have become a team principal had things gone differently.
“HRT was a very funny story because I was at McLaren and I could have been there for a long time but I wanted to go back racing badly and I knew that with McLaren, there was no way I would ever race there,” he reviewed.
“So the opportunity came, it was a Spanish team and they wanted me to race for one year and then become the team principal on the second year but I still wanted to race for more than one year.
“So I said, ‘Ok, give me two years of racing and then I’m very happy to actually step up into that role.’ But after one year, they run out of money.
“I mean, the hybrid era was coming, we had no money really to sustain that but it was a fantastic project and I would have done it again. It was one of the best years in my career with a great group of people fighting with very little money being very creative.
“At some circuits we were incredibly fast for the car we had like in Monaco when I outqualified the two Marussias – for us that was like victory. It was a cool project with wrong timing as well. We had the credit crunch, a problem with Spanish and European debt, it was not the right time to look for sponsorship in Spain so the team had to close down.”
These days, Pedro is an ambassador for the Aston Martin F1 team, having been in the role for about a year.
“It’s been an incredible first year,” he says, “and I’ve enjoyed it a lot more than what I was expecting, mainly because of the people. The atmosphere in this team is great, but it was great already in November last year when the team hadn’t achieved any podiums.
“It’s very easy when everything is going well, but we’ve had tough races here as well and the atmosphere hasn’t changed. We started very well, then we went into some races where we were starting from the pit lane, which was very difficult for all of us but the people remained the same.
“I think Aston made an incredible progression during 2022 and it just continued during the winter and during the first races. The angle of the line of progression is consistent. It’s steep and I’m not surprised to be honest. I’m happy that we have managed to be where we are, but it’s not a surprise given what I’ve seen in the in the factory and the people in the team.
“If you go to our campus, you realise why we are where we are really. It’s not like Jaguar where you thought this is going to take years and years to get there. We have everything in place.”
