Former racer Pedro de la Rosa has taken on a sweeping new role with the Aston Martin Formula 1 team.
The Spaniard has been announced as a Team Ambassador, his role including communications, media, public relations, marketing, promotional, commercial, as well as general advisory duties to the squad.
He will principally work with the Silverstone operation’s media and communications team, currently headed by former McLaren PR boss Matt Bishop.
Bishop and de la Rosa have worked together; the 51-year-old was a test driver for McLaren during the 2000s while the former was at the helm.
De la Rosa is the latest in a string of ex-McLaren signings by Aston Martin which have included back-office staff and Martin Whitmarsh (ex-CEO of McLaren Racing and McLaren Group), who holds an overarching position across the race team operations as Group CEO of Aston Martin Performance Technologies.
“Obviously, it’s a new role for myself for the team,” de la Rosa explained.
“I’m extremely excited about it, because it just comes in the perfect time on my life, but more importantly, also on the, on the future of Aston Martin and all the challenges ahead.
“At the end of the day, I don’t think my role would be very different from what I used to do for other teams in the past, except for the most important difference, which is that I’m not driving, but all the rest is pretty similar when you have to give support to the marketing and communications side of the business.”
Aston Martin is in a building phase following the buyout of what was formerly Force India by a consortium led by billionaire Lawrence Stroll.
Alongside an aggressive recruitment drive, which has already attracted several high-profile staff, including design guru Dan Fallows and two-time world champion Fernando Alonso (who was also at McLaren during Bishop’s tenure).
There has been significant investment in infrastructure at the team’s base. A new factory is under construction, ready to come online for the 2023 season.
It will be a vast improvement on the facility the squad currently operates out of, which started life with Jordan Grand Prix in the early 1990s.
On-track performances have been left wanting. It sits seventh in the constructors’ championship with three sixth-place finishes its best results of the 2022 season.
The squad ended last year’s championship in seventh, having been fourth at the end of 2020 under its previous guise.
“I know very little about the team compared to, to the people that have been working in Aston Martin,” de la Rosa said of where the team finds itself.
“I visited the team in July. I came back to Team Silverstone because my first ever team in Formula One was Jordan Grand Prix in ’98, so I knew the team, or the roots of the team back then, and when I arrived in the summer in July, I was shocked.
“I was shocked about the transformation it was leading, the investment that was being made in the wind tunnel.
“But more importantly in the ambition of the team members, the people that I met.
“It was back then when I set to myself, wow, it would be great to get involved with Aston Martin, just inside myself, it just grew this feeling that this is the right place, the right team.
“Maybe it was the fact as well that I was visiting my old team,” he added.
“It also helped a bit to bring up the emotions.
“But it was a fantastic feeling to meet engineers. They all believe the team could do it, they could get to winning ways.
“So that made me make me change [and] think ‘wow, I want to be here’. I was lucky that the interest came from Aston Martin then because many times, you know, love doesn’t come on both sides. But in this time in this case, it happened.”
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