Yost Capito: Nick de Vries waited for his time

Last season Nick de Vries had the chance to drive the cars of half of the championship teams, and in Brazil he had the chance to replace the ailing Lando Norris and drive a McLaren. It would have been the sixth car, but the Briton still found the strength to go to the start. That Norris didn’t make it to the finish afterwards is another story.

The most important thing is that de Vries finishes 2022 as a driver of the AlphaTauri team and he finally gets a full debut in Formula 1, which he has been waiting for for a long time.

During Friday practice sessions, Nick worked with the Mercedes, Aston Martin and Williams teams at various stages of the season, and coincidentally spent his first race in Formula 1 at Monza with this team. In the autumn, last year’s Formula E champion also drove an Alpine A521 in private testing, and he already got behind the wheel of the AphaTauri car in official testing in Abu Dhabi, as next year he will be Yuki Tsunoda’s new partner .

But the main event of the year for Nick was of course his participation in the Italian Grand Prix, where he replaced Alex Albon, who needed urgent surgery to remove his appendix.

After a single practice session on Saturday, de Vries was 12th in qualifying and ninth in the race, earning his first points in his debut Grand Prix. He was considered one of the candidates for a place in the Williams, as the team decided to part ways with Nicholas Latifi, but the Grove ultimately relied on young American Logan Sargent. And then Nick signed a contract with AlphaTauri.

“What happened to Alex then came as a shock to us at first,” Williams team principal Jost Capito recalled in an interview with RacingNews365. – But we knew we could use the services of a good reserve racer: I met Nick a year ago, we even made friends. I understood what he was capable of and that he would adapt to the team without any problems.

I was convinced that he would be able to take this opportunity, although the opportunity came to him quite late and he was always older than the guys he had to compete with. But luck comes to those who work hard, and Nick’s example was a good example of that.

His motorsport career spans many years, he has always been tenacious, competing in several series and never giving up on the dream of one day getting into Formula 1. Nick always smiles, never loses his temper, rarely seems upset – he just waited for his time to come”.

At Monza, however, De Vries almost abandoned the race, but circumstances intervened: on lap 45 of the race, Daniel Riccardo’s car stopped on the side of the road between two Lesmo corners, and it turned out that a crane was needed to to evacuate him. .

With only a few laps to go before the end of the Grand Prix, race management decided that the peloton would finish behind the safety car. According to Capito, de Vries’ car could not hold up on a restart: “If the race were to resume, we would have to take the car out of the race. Even if there was only one lap left after the green flag, she wouldn’t have made it to the finish line and we wouldn’t have earned any points.

But who knows how it would end. I think Nick deserved this happiness, he worked hard for this. In the end he was lucky, but it was well-deserved luck.”