Nick de Vries: Spielberg’s trail is harder than it looks

Four races in a row in AlphaTauri did not yield any points and hope to break this series in Austria…

Nick deVries: “I enjoyed the Montreal round, but the car wasn’t efficient enough and we didn’t have the best weekend. Both myself and the team didn’t always make the right decisions, so I couldn’t earn any points in the end. It’s disappointing, but we have to look ahead, where we wait for the race on the two circuits I know. The team will bring new items to Spielberg and Silverstone, I hope these two weekends will be successful.

Spielberg has a relatively short course, but in fact it is much more difficult than it looks. Here the load on the brakes is great and a small mistake leads to a serious loss of time. The configuration includes several straights and four fast corners, and it’s very hard to find a compromise when tuning the car – on the one hand you want to put as much pressure on the car as possible with the rear wings, on the other other hand, so as not to allow too much loss of speed on the straights to fight rivals. Usually you also have to pay for this due to the fact that with less downforce the car will slide more, which accelerates tire wear.

We have a weekend with Saturday’s sprint, which will make it even more difficult – we won’t have much time to find settings. But I like this format when we have two races per weekend. The sprint allows you to understand what to expect from Sunday’s race and to please the fans.

The Austrian Grand Prix takes place in beautiful surroundings and is home to the entire Red Bull family. There are always many Dutch fans in Spielberg, the stands are painted orange. We will do our best to make them proud of our achievement.”

Yuki Tsunoda: “It’s a shame we couldn’t put everything together in Canada – the speed of the car allowed us to earn points. After showing good pace in the third practice session, we couldn’t repeat it in qualifying, which also prevented the race.
I tried to recoup with an aggressive strategy. We may not have done everything right, but this experience will help us in the future.

Ahead of the Spielberg race, I really like this circuit, where I scored points in my debut season two years ago. This weekend it is important to get the maximum out of the car in the first practice, because we qualify immediately afterwards.

In preparation for this race I worked a lot on the simulator, which is especially important when it comes to sprinting. Our plan is to get started during the first training and feel confident right away. In Spielberg there is a lot of pressure on the brakes, but the team did everything they could to solve the problems we encountered in some races. There are only four hard braking points on this circuit and I am sure we will look better in this area than in previous Grands Prix.

I think we’re in for a tough weekend, but there’s always a great atmosphere in Spielberg as it’s Red Bull’s home track. It will be great to earn points.”