Tost happy with complaining De Vries: "Was a wake-up call for engineers"
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- GPblog.com
Nyck de Vries had a day and a half of testing with the AT04 last week in Bahrain. However, the Dutchman has been incredibly important on several occasions with providing feedback on what is good and not so good about the Alpha Tauri car. Franz Tost even said that De Vries has caused a wake-up call at the Faenza-based racing team with his pointers.
De Vries is gearing up for his first season in Formula 1 this season. For the past two years, the Dutchman has been closely involved with the Mercedes team and has already driven several cars. Not only did he step in at Mercedes and Williams, the cars of Aston Martin, McLaren and Alpine were also put to the test by the 28-year-old driver from Sneek.
Detailed feedback De Vries
This provides De Vries with the necessary experience, allowing him (despite having little actual racing experience) to provide detailed feedback. They knew that at Alpha Tauri, because when De Vries drove for a day in the AT03 at a test after the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, they received more than enough points for improvement.
"Fortunately, he complained a lot about the car, because that was a wake-up call for the engineers. He gave us a long to-do list. I liked that," Tost told Motorsport-Magazin.com. However, AlphaTauri's engineers were not initially happy with the criticism, as it provided a lot of homework. "The engineers wanted to argue that our solutions were good. I always told them: look where we are in the constructors' classification."
Future AlphaTauri
AlphaTauri finished second last in the Constructors' Championship last season. The 2022 car was not competitive enough and only 35 points were eventually scored by Pierre Gasly and Yuki Tsunoda. The team is currently suffering losses and may therefore be disposed of by parent company Red Bull in the near future.