De Vries in right place: 'It obviously helps if you speak Italian'

After a one-off foray at Italy with Williams last year, De Vries will make his real debut in Formula 1 in 2023 with a full season driving for AlphaTauri. Red Bull Racing's Italian sister team, along with Ferrari, is one of the teams based outside England. De Vries managed to quickly master the Italian culture prevalent at the team over the past few months.

De Vries left school but never fell behind

In an interview with De telegraaf the brand-new Alpha Tauri driver tells more about his background. For instance, he explained why he dropped out of secondary school: "Actually, things were going fine, but of course in the Netherlands you have compulsory education and you can only be absent a certain number of days. I had already rushed through those absence days before the racing season started. My father then found a creative solution, deregistered us and we moved to Italy. That way I was no longer visible to Dutch compulsory education. But it wasn't like we had an illegal existence, mind you. We did fulfill our obligations in the Netherlands."

The time he spent karting in Italy in his youth gave him a good understanding of the Italian language. In fact, the driver from the Dutch province of Friesland speaks Italian better than Frisian. For his integration into the F1 team, it is very convenient: "It is a part of Italian culture, that they appreciate it when people make an effort to speak the language. In my opinion, it's never good enough, but I really do speak it a bit. It helped me enormously to integrate quickly among the mechanics and other people in the team. With the engineers, when we talk about technical stuff, we just speak English. On everything else, I try to speak Italian as much as possible."