By Sam Cooper
April 27 2007

Vodafone McLaren Mercedes test driver Pedro De La Rosa has willingly accepted an award, rewarding what he has done for motorsport over his entire career.

Way back in 1997 when Pedro managed to successfully triumph in winning the Formula Nippon F3000 series, which promoted him to an Formula one drive with Jordan in 1998 when Pedro was just 27.

In the scale of things now, 27 is too old for someone to enter formula one and be a superstar, like many greats have been, such as Michael Schumacher, Fernando Alonso, Kimi Räikkönen and Lewis Hamilton, they all entered in their early 20’s. Its not age that defines how someone performs in formula one, its their talent, and Pedro has a lot of talent.

Form an reasonably successful Jordan team, Pedro went to Arrows in 1999 where his season never really took off, as Arrows could simply not compete with the front runners extreme pace.

Pedro continued to work at Arrows in 2000 where the season yielded little result, with Pedro finishing 16th with just 2 points to his name, for the whole season.

In 2001 Pedro struggled with the reliability of his car, failing to finish a huge six times in that season, however some of his retirements were due to a collision during the race. 2001 netted him three points.

Things got much worse in 2002; Pedro didn’t manage to score any points in the entire season, Pedro must have done something right, as he got a better job with more potential, in 2003 he got a job with McLaren as their test driver, Pedro was unable to get a race in, despite being their test driver, the same happened in 2004.

In 2005, Pedro got a race driver, be it for the Bahrain race, Pedro got 4 points by finishing 5th.

In 2006 things took a fair for the better, after Jaun Pablo Montoya’s dreadful race at Indianapolis, Pedro got his dream break, 8 races with the fast McLaren team, with possibilities of him racing in 2007, as we all know, Lewis Hamilton got that job, and Pedro was relegated to test driver once more.