‘I’ve made too many mistakes’, admits De Vries · RaceFans
AlphaTauri’s rookie driver Nyck de Vries admittef he has made too many mistakes during the opening five rounds of the 2023 season.
The 28-year-old sits at the bottom of the championship standings, one of only two drivers to have not yet scored any points in the season so far alongside fellow rookie, Williams driver Logan Sargeant.
While De Vries’ team mate Yuki Tsunoda has scored two top ten results and finished no lower than 11th in all five races so far, De Vries’ highest finish is 14th, which he achieved in the first two rounds in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
However, his season has been marred by incidents in recent rounds. He suffered front wing damage in Australia before being knocked out of the race by Sargeant at the final restart. He crashed out of both qualifying and the grand prix in Baku. During the last round in Miami, he ran into Lando Norris at the first corner, which compromised him for the remainder of the race, finishing in 18th.
“I definitely think that I personally made too many mistakes – I will admit that very openly,” De Vries told media including RaceFans in Monaco.
“I also believe that the pace has been strong at several moments and that kind of encourages me and gives me confidence. I haven’t been able to kind of execute at the end and haven’t been able to put it together, but I do believe that the speed has been kind of there. Equally, I made too many mistakes to turn that into a result, but that’s part of the learning process you go through. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. We are all human, we make mistakes and we move on.”
De Vries arrived in F2 as the 2019 Formula 2 champion and the 2021 Formula E world champion. He made his grand prix debut at last year’s Italian Grand Prix at Monza, stepping into Alexander Albon’s Williams after Albon suffered appendicitis, taking an impressive eighth place finish.
Asked by RaceFans if he was finding the transition to Formula 1 more dfficult than he had expected, De Vries admitted “you’re as good as your last race.”
“If you would have asked the same question after Monza, everyone would have had a very different perception,” he said. “Now I have had a bit of a more difficult start of the season and it becomes more relevant. I don’t really go in that much depth, it’s just I made some mistakes and that’s it.”
Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and
2023 Monaco Grand Prix
Browse all 2023 Monaco Grand Prix articles
