De la Rosa met expectations, say McLaren

The Spaniard took the best result of his career with second place at the Hungarian Grand Prix, in his third outing for the team in place of Juan Pablo Montoya.

Although McLaren had said that a decision about their second driver would be taken after this weekend, the team informed de la Rosa before the race start that he would continue with them for the Turkish and Italian Grands Prix.

McLaren F1 CEO Martin Whitmarsh told autosport.com: "Pedro will be in the car for the next two Grands Prix. We had confirmed that to him before the race because anything can happen in these races and we didn't want that to be a factor playing on anyone's mind."

De la Rosa has scored points in two of his three races for the team and is in contention to be Fernando Alonso's teammate in 2007.

Whitmarsh praised de la Rosa's approach to the Hungarian Grand Prix, where he was putting Kimi Raikkonen under pressure before the crash with Vitantonio Liuzzi.

"I think he has fully met expectations," explained Whitmarsh about the job de la Rosa has done since being promoted to the race team.

"We have worked with him well, he did a great job, and he was probably the calmest man in the team when he was behind Michael (Schumacher) and trying to get past.

"We were anxious to see that happen but he stayed calm, knew he had time, knew he had pace and knew he was trying to get by. There was only one dry line at that time and Michael is not an easy car to pass at the best of times.

"So all the way through the race, as he said afterwards, he could have pushed harder at all sort of times but he just took a judgement that you have to finish the race in these sort of conditions and a lot of other cars didn't."