De la Rosa set to start Pirelli testing

As revealed last week, the Spanish driver was already confirmed as the man in charge of carrying out testing duties for Pirelli alongside Romain Grosjean.

The Spanish driver was left without a racing drive after Sauber decided to replace him with Nick Heidfeld for the last five races of the season.

De la Rosa was officially confirmed in his new role at a press conference near Istanbul on Monday.

"I'm really pleased to be joining Pirelli," said de la Rosa. "Tyre testing is something that I have always enjoyed as it is a very big challenge, especially in Formula 1. The information you can get from telemetry and sensors is valuable, but nothing replaces the individual feeling of a driver with new tyres so I hope I can be a real asset to Pirelli.

"There's not a lot of time left and a huge amount of work to do, but I'm very much looking forward to it and I am sure that our collaboration will be a success. A lot of useful work has been done already and now we have the opportunity of taking it forward."

De la Rosa will start testing for Pirelli next month in Spain, with a two-day session at the Valencia circuit on October 5-6.

Grosjean, meanwhile, completed two days of testing at Monza last week, concentrating on defining the construction of the tyres.

Pirelli said the tyres stood up to the challenge very well.

"Romain jumped in to do some durability testing and did an excellent job," said Pirelli's Motorsport Director Paul Hembery.

"The objective of this test was to confirm the structural specification of the tyres we will use for the first time at the test in Abu Dhabi, and we now move on to working on our rain tyres and compound definition."