'De Vries needed more than 10 GPs before being cast aside'

Did De Vries deserve to be sacked? Not in my book, no. With so little pre-season testing nowadays, and none at all in-season, a rookie (yes, I know he raced for Williams in the Italian Grand Prix last year, thank you, dear pedants, but he is still as-near-as-dammit a rookie) needs more than 10 grands prix before he should be cast aside, especially when he has been racing a car as trickily mediocre as the AlphaTauri AT04.

At the time of his ousting, De Vries trailed his team-mate Yuki Tsunoda seven-three in qualifying and eight-two in races, which is pretty much what you might expect when you remember that Tsunoda is in his third full F1 season and De Vries was in the first half of his first.

De Vries has looked a bit clumsy at times – his car and Kevin Magnussen’s have recently appeared to be fitted with magnets unerringly attracted to each other – and, knowing Nyck as I do, I think that that clumsiness was born of an intense desire to perform, exacerbated by a growing desperation engendered by a gnawing fear that his card was being marked (or Marko’d).

Indeed, Helmut Marko, whose job title of adviser risibly underplays the power he exerts within both AlphaTauri and Red Bull, was typically blunt when quizzed by media about the decision: “We saw no improvement [in De Vries]. We had to do something. Nyck is a very nice guy, but the speed just wasn’t there, so why wait?”

The truth may be that Marko – and Christian Horner – are concerned about the iffy recent form of Checo Perez in their A-team, and want to give Daniel Ricciardo a few grands prix for AlphaTauri early enough that they can either promote him to said A-team for next year or, if it turns out that he is not as good as he once was, cast their net wider. Perez may of course redeem himself, but he needs to get his skates on.

The current bunch of F1 race drivers and reserve drivers have a WhatsApp group, and quite a few of them used it last week to send De Vries messages of not only condolence but also support.

AlphaTauri is not a big team, and most of its senior managers are technical or operational rather than strategic or tactical, since senior managerial strategy and tactics tend to be handed down from Marko and, less overtly, Horner. Technical and operational people in F1 teams, even big ones, tend to think that racing is mostly about data. Well, of course data is important, very important, but racing is also about subtle work done by clever people who understand what makes drivers’ minds, hearts and souls tick.

Drivers are nervily brilliant athletes, and people like that need sophisticated assistance and empathetic support in order to deliver optimal results. The people who know that better than anyone are the drivers themselves, hence their WhatsApp support for de Vries — an increasingly lonely figure, in a difficult team, whom they had seen struggling. Anyone who has worked in a relatively senior position at or near the centre of a successful F1 team — as I have — knows how that cookie crumbles. All sports are the same.

But F1 is particularly tough. Even the very best drivers spend most of their time losing. The most successful driver in the history of our sport, Lewis Hamilton, may have won a gargantuan 103 grands prix, but he has failed to win 217, a total to which he is adding every fortnight. Michael Schumacher’s comparative stats are 91 wins against 215 non-wins; Sebastian Vettel’s are 53/246; Alain Prost’s are 51/148; Verstappen’s are 43/130. You have to go all the way back to Juan Manuel Fangio, whose comparative stats are 24/27, to find anything like win/non-win parity, and Fangio (a) was utterly brilliant when almost no-one else was, (b) was a remarkable statistical outlier even in his day, and (c) drove his last grand prix 65 years ago, when F1 was very much less competitive in depth than it is now.

De Vries may or may not reappear in F1. Personally, I hope he does. If he does not, he will race elsewhere, and he will win there. He has won whenever he has been given a fair crack, which he has not – yet – in F1. He was a karting sensation; he won seven races and a championship in Formula Renault 2.0; he won one race in Formula Renault 3.5; he won two races in GP3; he won eight races and a championship in Formula 2; he won four races and a championship in Formula E; he won two races in the European Le Mans Series; he took a class win (LMP2) in the World Endurance Championship; it is a tasty tally.

Earlier I mentioned Magnussen, with whom, as with De Vries, I worked closely when I was at McLaren. He has raced in 151 grands prix so far, but none has been better than his first, the 2014 Australian Grand Prix, in which he finished third on the road, which became second after Ricciardo had been disqualified. Unlike De Vries, Magnussen was retained by his team for the following year, albeit in that notoriously insipid position of reserve driver, becoming bored and ratty as the 2015 season wore on.

He was dropped in the autumn, not only suddenly but also pitilessly, since he learned of his dismissal via an email sent to him by a person he barely knew, Justine Bowen, Ron Dennis’s long-suffering PA, which pinged its way into his inbox on his 23rd birthday. A bit rough, that. Nonetheless, against the odds, he found an F1 drive with Renault in 2016, then raced four F1 seasons for Haas. By the end of 2020 he had run out of F1 options, and he spent 2021 racing in IMSA for Chip Ganassi, which he loved. He owed his surprise return to F1 in 2022 to Vladimir Putin, whose decision to send the Russian army into Ukraine made untenable Haas’s intended retention of Nikita Mazepin, a Muscovite born and bred. F1 moves in mysterious ways. Take heart, dear Nyck.