I worked my entire life to get to F1 but was sacked after 10 races - nobody knows the brutal reality like I do
Nobody knows the brutal reality of life waiting on an F1 breakthrough as well as Nyck de Vries.
A Formula 2 champion in 2019, the Dutchman would have to wait until 2022 to line up on an F1 grid for the first team - as he filled in for the ill Alex Albon at Williams during the Italian GP at Monza. His stunning drive secured an ninth place finish and made the Mercedes junior hot property - and he eventually plumped to follow Max Verstappen's route by signing for Red Bull's second team, Alpha Tauri, for the 2023 campaign.
But the moved proved a disaster, with De Vries unable to score a point as he was axed by the team after just 10 races - and replaced by Daniel Ricciardo. Now opening up about the experience the 30-year-old, who competed GT racing and Formula E as he waited on his chance, revealed the brutal truth about life as a driver failing to deliver results on the biggest stage in motorsport.
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He told the Cool Room podcast: "I guess I didn’t really come up to speed quickly enough. I think there were some situations where the coin could have easily landed in my favour, but it didn’t. Ultimately, my bosses didn’t think it was good enough for the time I was there, and they decided to replace me. It was a challenging time because there were a lot of talks publicly about it, and I wasn’t really aware of anything. At least there wasn’t really much of a dialogue with me, personally.
“You pick up everything through the media. During F1 weekends you speak a lot to the media, so basically every weekend since maybe my second weekend, I’d just arrived and I had to answer questions about my future, which felt a little bit out of place – but that’s how it went or can go. You obviously have the media, so you have external kind of pressure, but you also have internal pressure, and every team deals with that differently, they basically double up.
“Everywhere you are, you almost feel like the media are looking at you and they, I wouldn’t say attack you, but you feel that they write and talk about it 24/7, so when you are walking in the paddock, when you are moving within that ecosystem, everyone knows about it and you can’t hide from it. Even though you would like to, there is no way to escape. The way I tried to deal with it was just to ignore it and not to read anything – I just stopped reading any news. But you still kind of know it’s there.”
Despite his ruthless treatment however, de Vries holds no ill feeling towards Red Bull for only giving him 10 weekends to prove his worth - after a lifetime of work. He added: "I’m grateful for the opportunity that they have given me. I was able to kind of fulfil my childhood dream. It didn’t work out, it became a short chapter in my career.
“I would say I was very grateful that I had the chance to build a career before F1, because sometimes it happens that drivers are promoted to F1 and it ends quickly, or prematurely, and then they don’t really have anything to fall back to. I consider myself lucky that I already spent time in Formula E and WEC, which made the transition back to those championships, I would say, more straightforward.”
