Jeroen Bleekemolen sees that Nyck de Vries is slowly but surely improving. The Dutchman set up two decent weekends in Monaco and Spain and has given himself some time to save his seat. However, slow is a word that would rather not be used in motorsport, so there is still plenty of work to be done for the AlphaTauri driver to maintain the upward trend and continue.
“He’s just still having a hard time,” Bleekemolen sees in the Formule1.nl podcast Paddockpraat. The racing driver acknowledges that there is an upward trend, but that it will take even more to keep his seat. ‘It is finally true that he had a normal weekend. He had a pretty good qualifying and a decent result in the race. But he really needs to have a top weekend now to be able to turn it around. You can see that things are slowly improving, but you prefer not to use the word slowly in motorsport.’
He seems to have survived Marko’s first deadline, but this is certainly not enough for De Vries. In any case, for the time being it is a stay of execution. “He has bought some time now after the past few weekends. That upward trend really has to stay there and it has to go up considerably’, says Bleekemolen, who does state that the expectations of the Dutchman were set very high in advance by Marko and team boss Franz Tost. ‘I think that’s inconvenient of the team, because then you immediately put that pressure on it.’
Tsunoda is on top of it
With the high expectations towards De Vries, in Bleekemolen’s eyes, the qualities of teammate Tsunoda were also quickly ignored, who, according to the analyst, is anything but a mediocre driver. “Don’t underestimate Tsunoda. It’s just really really good. And listen to his drill radio, he’s full on it! Maybe he is still too aggressive at times, like last race. But better that than too slow. This also motivates the mechanics and they also go a step faster. In the end it just works that way.’
