Pedro de la Rosa (pictured right) joined Aston Martin as a team ambassador last October.Courtesy of Aston Martin
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You can’t have a discussion about sports technology today without including athletes in that conversation. Their partnerships, investments and endorsements help fuel the space – they have emerged as major stakeholders in the sports tech ecosystem. The Athlete’s Voice series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind. Excerpts of the Q&A have been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Pedro de la Rosa raced in Formula 1 from 1999-2012, participating in 107 Grands Prix across five teams (Arrows, Jaguar, McLaren, Sauber, and HRT), including a podium finish for McLaren at the 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix.
The veteran hasn’t strayed far from the sport since retiring. In 2022, he joined Aston Martin F1 as an ambassador, a role which includes assisting with the team’s driver development program. He also works for DAZN as a Spanish language commentator on F1 broadcasts.
“I think it’s an incredible, fantastic moment in the history of Aston Martin F1 — feeling the energy, feeling the changes, feeling the growth, and how competitive we are becoming in the past few months,” De la Rosa recently told SBJ. The team now ranks fourth in the 2023 Constructor Championship, with drivers Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll fourth and 10th in the drivers’ standings, respectively.
At a networking event for Aston Martin partners at the company’s new flagship location in Manhattan in late September, De la Rosa spoke with SBJ about the sea of technological change in F1 since his driving days, Aston Martin’s recent strides and the upcoming U.S. races in Austin (Oct. 22) and Las Vegas (Nov. 19).
On the key tech innovations in F1 since he began driving…
The sport has evolved so much since I was racing, or I started racing in Formula 1. The biggest difference from my point of view is the amount of sensors that we have in a Formula 1 car — because when I was starting in Formula 1, you had 20 sensors, now we have 200, basically. 200 on the chassis side, 200 on the engine. The amount of information that we collect live, that the engineers have to analyze as the drivers are running, is huge. There’s 1.5 terabytes of information collected every Grand Prix, every three days, per car. So that means that there’s a lot of people analyzing all that data, and they must concentrate on the ones that are really relevant to make you go faster, you know, for the driver. There’s a lot of other sensors that are not performance-related but are reliability-related. So there’s a lot of information to be analyzing and this is the biggest difference nowadays.
On specific applications of that data…
For example, we have sensors in the tires. So we are [monitoring] the surface temperature of the four tires… we are [monitoring] the pressures… This is something that, when I was racing, it was never relevant. Not relevant, we were never monitoring. So basically when you came into the garage, there was a mechanic that was checking your tire pressures, or your tire temperatures. But now it’s just life, it’s as you run. And the driver has, in the display, you have all these data points. So you need to treat the tires in a way to optimize the temperature and pressure. So it is a lot more complex. You have the power unit, which, it’s hybrid power unit, which means that you have to manage energy. It’s not just driving flat-out on the race, you need to save some fuel sometimes, you need to harvest energy. So it is a lot more complex than when I was racing.
On top of that — it might be a bit boring — there is the GPS. All cars in Formula 1 have GPS sensors, which means that we know exactly where we are around the track. We know where we are and our competitors are, which means that, thanks to the GPS sensors, we can extract their speed rate. And then we know the speed they are traveling through the lap. And therefore we can compare against our speed. So we know exactly where they are faster than us, and slower, which is also unique and never happened in my time. In my time, you never knew where the other people were slower or faster than you. You could have a feeling on the sector times, you know? But now we know exactly — which corner, if it’s the braking… we know exactly everything about us and our competitors, which in the past, it never happened.
On the learning curve of managing that data as a racer…
It’s easy in the sense that it has happened gradually. When I started racing, there was no data acquisition systems, it was just plain, it was just feeling. You just drove as fast as you could. Now the young generations have already all the telemetry systems, have them in karting. So therefore they are better trained, I would say they are more complete than my generation was.
There are simulators on top of this. So if you have any doubts, if you want to learn tracks, learn new cars, handling, et cetera, et cetera, or try different setups — you go into the simulator. So it has all evolved, but it has been gradual, so it has been quite easy. I think that the new generations are better prepared because of that. I always say that the new generations will always be faster than the old ones because they are starting from an earlier age with better tools. So there’s no way that the new Formula 1 champions will not be stronger than the current ones.
“The amount of information that we collect live, that the engineers have to analyze as the drivers are running, is huge,” De la Rosa (pictured right) tells SBJ. “There’s 1.5 terabytes of information collected every Grand Prix, every three days, per car.”Courtesy of Aston Martin
How Aston Martin leverages technology…
There’s many things that contribute to a competitive team in Formula 1. Lawrence Stroll, our chairman, always says that you need the people. We have the people. We are growing as a team. We are a young team. But we are still growing and strengthening our team.
You need the processes, which, thanks to our partners like Cognizant for example, they really give us that edge. And then you need the tools. And on the tools side, we are still in the process of getting the best tools available, which is, basically, in May we started with our new campus, which is a state-of-the-art factory. But we are building our wind tunnel still. So we won’t have it ready until 2024, end of 2024. I think we are providing our team, our people with the best possible tools. We are in the process. We haven’t yet fulfilled the quantity and quality of the tools that they deserve. But we are in the process.
On Aston Martin’s new technology campus in Silverstone, England, which opened in June…
We’re still 150-plus people and still growing. This just gives you — it’s 750 people to design, produce, manufacture, develop two Formula 1 cars in 22 weekends around the year. It means that it is so important to have them all under the same roof and make sure there’s synergies between all the departments. We didn’t have this in the past. There were different departments scattered around Silverstone. Now we are all working under the same roof, which has added a lot of synergies in the whole organization. We have the simulator as well, we have the wind tunnel which is being built — so it’s still not completed, but we’re on a good path.
It’s critical to have everyone aligned in this business, because time is money. We have budget cap, we are limited on what we can invest. And the quicker you can develop a Formula 1 car, the more races you will win, the faster your car will be. It is very important, it’s a game-changer for us, really.
On Aston Martin F1’s 2023 car, the AMR23…
I think that the most incredible thing about this, the AMR23, is that 95% of the car is new. So I think this just highlights how much work has been done in-house…
When I watch one of these Formula 1 cars, like here for example, it just has changed so much. Although it’s quite a modern Formula 1 car, I can see that it’s been outdated because of the rate of development. And this is something that is really unique to Formula 1, is how cars change, how big they are. If you watch this car compared to the cars I was racing, it’s nearly one meter longer, it’s nearly 200 kilos heavier — it’s 798 kilos, I was racing with 600 kilos. But one thing that is outstanding about this car is the amount of downforce that it produces, especially through the floor. It’s a shame, really, because one of the most unique parts of this car is facing the asphalt. So we are not appreciating all the shapes, all the work the engineers have done in producing that piece of engineering that is such a differentiator nowadays. But it’s a beautiful car. I mean I’m biased, obviously, but I would say we have the prettiest Formula 1 car in the grid.
On F1’s rising popularity in North America…
I must say that, when I started in Formula 1, we came here, to the (United) States, to race in Indianapolis, and it was kind of a race that was not — you didn’t feel like there was a lot of interest in the States.
I raced here in 2001 and 2002. I remember, in 2001, where I was racing in Indianapolis, and I was on the news because I achieved the fastest top speed on the main strait. But that is not something important in Formula 1. In Formula 1, it’s obviously the lap time is what matters. But I remember on the TV they were just talking about the fastest was Pedro De La Rosa. They were comparing to Indianapolis 500… It’s a completely different format, but that highlighted the fact that there was not a lot of interest in Formula 1 because they were still comparing against Indy 500.
Through the years, it has developed, it has transformed. I would say we are in the middle of an explosion of interest of Formula 1 in the States. You can see that by the amount of people that followed the race in Miami, there were 270,000 people, 30,000 above the year 2021. Now we’re going to Austin and then Las Vegas. So it’s three Grands Prix in the same season in Formula 1 in the States. It’s just an example of how much interest there is in this country now with Formula 1. There’s many contributors to that — like Drive to Survive — but I also think that it’s important to highlight the fact that there’s been a pandemic in the middle and a lot of, we’ve been months and months at home playing with our simulators, with our video games. It needs to be quantified in the equation, because it has helped the new generations get in touch with Formula 1, understand Formula 1, understand what a Formula 1 driver has to handle, and deal with and how Formula 1 teams operate, through Drive to Survive, you know? I think all in all, it’s pushed the interest in Formula 1 worldwide, but especially in the States.
On what he is looking forward to at this year’s Austin and Las Vegas races…
First of all, as a Formula 1 fan — because I am a Formula 1 fan as well — the best thing you can have as a Formula 1 team, when you go to any country, is to see the grandstands are full and the people are cheering. It doesn’t really matter if they are cheering — obviously I would love to see the green grandstands like we’ve had in Barcelona, in Silverstone, in other countries — but it’s the fact that they feel a passion for Formula 1. And this is something I didn’t feel when I was racing in the States, I feel now. It’s a game-changer, the feeling that people feel passionate about Formula 1.
After that, I just hope that we can put a good show, that we have a good race, that the race is interesting, that there’s nice fights. Because there’s nothing worse, when you see passionate people attending a Grand Prix, leaving on a Sunday evening feeling that the race was boring. And sometimes the races are not as good as others. So I just hope that we can deliver a good show in Austin and Las Vegas especially, in these two Grand Prix, to the people in the States.