Axed Nyck de Vries urged to take inspiration from recent F1 comeback star’s story
F1 PR guru Matt Bishop has urged Nyck de Vries to take inspiration from Kevin Magnussen’s successful comeback following his exit from AlphaTauri.
Having been signed as Pierre Gasly’s replacement for 2023, De Vries was dropped by the Red Bull junior team last week after failing to score a point in the first 10 races of the season.
The Dutchman has been replaced by Daniel Ricciardo for the rest of the year, having struggled for pace and consistency alongside team-mate Yuki Tsunoda.
Will Nyck de Vries return to F1 in the future?
De Vries, who was crowned the F2 Champion in 2019 before winning the Formula E title in 2021, broke his silence on Wednesday, writing on Instagram that “it hurts that the F1 chance I dreamed of for so long ended prematurely.”
Bishop worked closely with De Vries when the 28-year-old was a member of McLaren’s junior driver academy and feels he should have been given more time by AlphaTauri.
And he speculated that the decision to make the change was sparked by Red Bull’s desire to increase the pressure on the underperforming Sergio Perez.
写为Motor Sport Magazine, he said: “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 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.
“The truth may be that [Helmut] 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.”
Bishop revealed that De Vries, who cut “an increasingly lonely figure in a difficult team” at AlphaTauri, has received messages of support from his fellow competitors in the F1 drivers’ WhatsApp group.
He identified Magnussen’s story as a potential source of inspiration for De Vries, with the Danish driver enjoying a respectable F1 career despite suffering a number of knockbacks in his early days.
尽管注册ing a podium on his grand prix debut in 2014, Magnussen was demoted to a reserve driver role at McLaren at the end of his maiden season before being dropped by the team entirely in 2015.
Magnussen also lost his seat with Haas at the end of 2020 but returned as Nikita Mazepin’s replacement last year and went on to secure the American team’s first-ever pole position in Brazil.
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Bishop wrote: “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.
“[Magnussen] 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.
“F1 moves in mysterious ways. Take heart, dear Nyck.”
