Hi all, welcome back to 30 days of Beyond the Grid with me Tom Clarkson.

I'm choosing some Beyond the Grid best bits in the build up to our brand new series of

podcasts which starts next week on the first of March.

But right now, preseason testing is underway in Bahrain.

And today we're going to hear from a driver who did literally thousands of kilometres

as a test driver for McLaren and Ferrari.

He also raced more than 100 Grand Prix and he celebrates his birthday today, Pedro de la Rosa.

Pedro told so many great stories when he came on the show but this one is particularly

relevant to today's Formula One because he was there when Lewis Hamilton first drove

a Formula One car.

He did a run and he was nowhere.

You know and I remember looking at his data and with Philip Brue with his, my race engineer

back then and we were looking at Philip Tony.

The boy will need to improve a lot over the years.

It's a long road for Lewis but he will be good but we just have to give him time blah

blah blah.

And I thought, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I did a run, came back, looked at the times and I saw Lewis was fastest.

You know, on the second run and I looked at the data and I said, what happened?

And well, we put him new tires.

So I looked in the data and he was so fast through the through through cops, back its

maggots that then I just realized the potential of Lewis Hamilton.

...