In an effort to make the next few days leading up to the first race weekend of the season a little more bearable, I have decided to spend some time introducing you to this season’s new rookies. We have 3 rookies joining the grid this year and all three will be closely watched by most fans to see what they’re able to accomplish especially on comparisons to their teammates.
The first rookie I’m going to talk about is Nyck De Vries. Nyck De Vries was born February 6, 1995 in The Netherlands. After starting with karts at the age of 9 in 2004, he moved onto single seaters in 2012. He was signed to the McLaren Young Driver Programme. He was gaining popularity and guest starred in a couple episodes of McLaren tooned and was being massively hyped up by the team as a future world champion.
He remained part of the junior programme until 2019 when McLaren chose up-and-coming talent, Lando Norris, and former Red Bull, Junior driver, Carlos Sainz Jr. to take the two open McLaren seats instead.
He then went on to win the 2019 formula to championship and spent the next few years as a Mercedes Junior Driver. He took part in the
2019/ 2020 WEC season where he finished 10th in the standings. That same year he also competed in the Formula E season for Mercedes-Benz EQ Formula E team. He finished that season in P11. He competed in the European Le Mans Series in 2020 and ended the season in fifth place. That same year (2020/2021 season) he took the Formula E championship title. His third season in Formula E in 2021/2022 was less successful, finishing in P9 while his teammate, Stoffel Vandoorne took the title. Luckily, over the last few years, he created a great relationship with the Mercedes Formula One team as their development, test, and reserve driver. Toto Wolff was very keen to see De Vries on the grid. His opportunity finally came when he was called to fill in for Alex Albon at the Italian Grand Prix after Albon came down with appendicitis. He managed to out, qualify his teammate Nicholas Latifi, and managed to keep the Williams in the top 10 throughout the whole race and scored points on his debut. This was enough to impress the whole paddock and helped him score a full-time seat with AlphaTauri for this upcoming 2023 Formula One season.
We are all so happy to see him. Finally get a chance in Formula 1 and hope to see some amazing driving from him this year! I know that I will be cheering them on every race!
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