What was the point of having Nyck de Vries in Formula 1?
Practically the modern definition of a professional racing driver, having made a decent living for himself as an eminently capable steerer in a variety of categories, he was dumped from Formula 1 after just 10 thoroughly average but hardly indictable grands prix performances in 2023’s worst car.
Neither he nor the team nor the Red Bull program appeared to learn or gain anything from the entire experience.
Even De Vries, if he were inclined to think of himself in the third person, must be asking himself exactly the same question.
What was the point of it all?
It’s instructive to consider how De Vries ended up getting his brief opportunity to race in Formula 1 in the first place.
The Dutchman had been knocking on F1’s door since winning the 2019 Formula 2 championship. That year’s junior series wasn’t considered particularly competitive, however, and his knocks went unanswered.
He chose the alternative career of combined World Endurance Championship and Formula E campaigns. He became a race winner in both and a Formula E world champion in his second campaign.
His Mercedes Formula E title led to a reserve role at the German marque’s Formula 1 team, which led to outings in practice sessions with Mercedes customers Williams and Aston Martin as well as with the works team.
That put him in the right place at the right time to substitute for Williams driver Alex Albon at the Italian Grand Prix after the Thai driver required immediate surgery for appendicitis.
The low-downforce, low-drag Williams car was on song that weekend at high-speed Monza, and De Vries turned in a spectacular short-notice weekend to qualify eighth and finish ninth.
That month coincided with the aftermath of Oscar Piastri’s defection from Alpine to join McLaren. Alpine needed a driver to replace Fernando Alonso and wanted to extract Pierre Gasly from AlphaTauri.
De Vries was again in the right place at the right time and now had the right results.
Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko swooped, and he was made an AlphaTauri driver.
A ROD FOR HIS OWN BACK
But that one result, combined with his success in other series, became the bar against which he would have his full-time debut measured.
“Yuki (Tsunoda) is still young and doesn‘t have that experience on a technical level, so Nyck can lead the team,” Marko told the Dutch Motorsport website last year. “We’ll see how it goes in practice next year, but judging by his experience and personality, Nyck should be the team leader.“
Rather than boost him, his past success dragged him down. It was a curse.
“We contracted Nyck because he did a great job in Monza last year,” Marko told Dutch paper De Telegraaf this week.
“He is 28, has a lot of experience and has also been able to gain a lot of knowledge as a test driver in multiple Formula 1 cars.
“You can’t compare him to a young rookie in my eyes.
“We expected him to be at least equal to his teammate Tsunoda this year, but that was not the case. In fact he was always three-tenths slower than Yuki. We saw no improvement.
“At the end of April in Baku he started the weekend well and I thought he would perform better, but then he crashed again. Unfortunately he didn’t do one super lap that really amazed us.
“We had to do something. Why should we wait, and what do two more races matter if you don’t see any improvement?
“Nyck is a very nice guy, but the speed just wasn’t there.”
It was evidently flawed to think that conventional wisdom about De Vries’s F1 potential was outweighed by a single good weekend in Italy.
All it’s done is make both driver and team look silly — driver for having such unrealistic expectations foisted on him and team for expecting magic in less than half of a disrupted season in what’s turned out to be a seriously unwieldy car.
It also doesn’t say much about the self-styled Red Bull development team’s ability to develop talent in F1. De Vries may never had had the makings of an F1 superstar, but he could well have become a decent midfielder worthy of his seat with some time and patience.
While it’s fair to say F1 isn’t a finishing school, AlphaTauri team principal Franz Tost himself said every driver needs three years to fully establish themselves. Tsunoda, enjoying a solid year in his third campaign, is a great example.
Consider counterpoint Logan Sargeant, the only other driver yet to score a point this season and being similarly smacked by his teammate.
“Just to have the team’s support throughout what has been a tough few races before these previous couple of good ones is really nice,” the American said, per Racer. “Just to know they have my back, to keep working with me, trying to help me, and since we brought the updates to the car it’s felt really good.”
Sargeant had his best weekend of the season in Silverstone and looks like he might finally be turning glimpses of speed into consistent performances.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE RED BULL DRIVER PROGRAM?
There have been questions about the Red Bull approach to driver development and its junior program for years.
Arguably the last time a driver completed the Red Bull driver pipeline all the way to F1 was Pierre Gasly in 2017. Yuki Tsunoda also managed it in 2021, though he was in the program in part thanks to his Honda connection.
It’s a far cry from the rolling driver roster of the previous decade, when Toro Rosso churned through 14 drivers in 14 seasons in search of its next superstar.
Now renamed AlphaTauri, the rotating door still spins, but it’s the same drivers perpetually moving through.
The once gushing Red Bull talent pipeline appears to have reduced to a trickle. Drivers enter and exit each year without ever getting so much as a glimpse of a path to Formula 1.
It’s Red Bull’s program, and management can do what it wants with it. Many drivers who’ve been through it have noted, fairly, that no-one is about to turn down a door-opening Red Bull logo when connections are so critical in the cutthroat junior years.
Red Bull also isn’t shy about saying its aim isn’t to foster young talent to become professional career drivers. The brand is explicitly looking for the next multiple F1 world champion in the guise of Sebastian Vettel or Max Verstappen — notwithstanding Verstappen was only inducted into the program with his first Formula 1 contract.
Young drivers know what they’re singing up for when they put pet to Red Bull-branded paper. If they can’t prove they have world beating potential as soon as possible, they’re out.
But one wonder how many great drivers — drivers capable of multiple wins and workmanlike titles — are being skipped over in pursuit of generational excellence. Surely it can’t be that Red Bull’s massive list of ex-junior drivers contains no-one capable of winning a grand prix.
THE LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCES OF NON-COMMITMENT
That super-ruthlessness has knocked on to some desperate driver calls at F1 level too.
Brendon Hartley, previously axed by the Red Bull program as a junior, was brought in for a season and a half before being dumped again.
Alex Albon, also previously cut from the team, was recalled to replace him but was dropped after two years — though that was thanks to his too-soon promotion to Red Bull Racing rather than an unsuitability to F1, as he continues to prove today.
Yuki Tsunoda replaced him, arguably having been rushed into F1 too soon, but the dearth of alternatives worked in his favour, and in his third year he’s become established in the top category.
De Vries was then drafted in — but he was only AlphaTauri’s third choice for the seat. Its first choice was to retain Gasly for what would have been an unprecedented fifth full-time season. Its second choice was to import IndyCar racer Colton Herta in part because of the marketing benefits he’d bring for F1’s US expansion plans. The FIA denied his request to be exempted from the superlicence qualification rules, rendering him ineligible for F1.
You could also consider that in a parallel universe Albon didn’t contract appendicitis, scored points for Williams in Italy and got his third crack at the Red Bull program at a time he was still associated with the energy drinks brand.
Ricciardo, who almost exactly five years ago decided he was done with the Red Bull F1 program, is now replacing De Vries.
At no stage in the last 12 months has, for example, Red Bull junior Liam Lawson appeared to get a look-in despite having the requisite superlicence points. Instead he was sent to Japan’s Super Formula this season to defer having to decide on his future.
True, it’s anomalous to have a driver as capable and ready as Ricciardo on the books as a reserve. He’s also on a six-month loan, after which Lawson or F2 star Ayumu Iwasa or one of the other five F2 drivers on the books could get some consideration for an AlphaTauri drive.
And in Red Bull Racing’s defence, its super-aggressive driver program is on the cusp of delivering a sixth constructors title and seventh drivers championship. The senior team hasn’t been without a title-calibre driver in its ranks since Vettel’s first championship in 2010, with only Ricciardo, who bridged the gap from Vettel to Verstappen, not having the chance to compete in championship-winning machinery.
But if Verstappen does what he constantly hints he’ll do and pull the plug on his F1 career at the end of his contract, is Red Bull’s driver program currently equipped to replace him with an established race winner and contender for the long term?
After yet another failed external driver experiment and ongoing non-commitment to its juniors, it doesn’t look like it.
