Nyck de Vries’ journey through the modern motor sport ecosystem has been neither smooth nor conventional, for he clawed his way to Formula 1 via talent, charm and graft; he shone brilliantly but fleetingly; he was swiftly and unceremoniously rejected by it; then he found not only success but also glory elsewhere. First he was jettisoned by McLaren – despite having been identified by that team’s bigwigs Ron Dennis and Martin Whitmarsh as a prodigious young talent and despite having won multiple karting and feeder series championships – and he was later discarded by AlphaTauri after just 10 grands prix, a timeframe that many commentators at the time regarded as unfairly brutal and brutally unfair. I was one of them.

Yet perhaps the single most impressive aspect of de Vries’ career is that every apparent dead end has somehow become another road ahead. His life story is not therefore one of failure interrupted by success, or even of success flecked with failure, but of a roller-coaster pilgrimage fuelled by unshakeable ambition, burning resilience and indefatigable resourcefulness. Rarely have I seen such determination packed into such a compact, wiry, lissome, albeit powerful frame. For the record, he stands just 5ft 5in (1.68m).

“I grew up in a family in which racing was a passion – my father’s passion specifically, I should say. He [Hendrik Jan de Vries] was an amateur racer. He raced Renault 5 Turbos, Renault Spiders and Formula Renaults, and when I was born [in February 1995] he was quite soon very keen to share his passion with his son and to continue to live his racing dream through me. So he bought a go-kart for me when I was five years old, and I first drove that go-kart on the parking lot of one of his car dealerships, because his business was selling Renaults. So I never really had a chance to consider anything other than racing as a career, because I grew up with racing. Dad’s was a decent business, but obviously it couldn’t provide the earnings that would finance a trajectory to F1. With our resources we were able to do karting. We didn’t have the money to fund me in formula cars, no, but we had the passion and the background, which was and is important.”

That distinction matters. Motor sport grandees have often liked to tell themselves that ability rises naturally to the surface, but the truth is more complicated: ability requires opportunity, and opportunity requires resource. De Vries’ career therefore had to be built on something other than money. It was duly assembled by commitment, sacrifice and a father’s and son’s willingness to keep pushing even when all the evidence suggested that their task was becoming almost too formidable.

Indeed, even young Nyck’s karting career was not initially the unstoppable march that it would soon become. “At national level we never really excelled. OK, we were always competitive, we were always finishing in the top three or the top five, but we never became Dutch champion or Belgian champion, for example. So I’d say that from age five to age 12 I always considered myself not mediocre but slightly in the background. We were putting in the hours, we were laying the foundations, but we weren’t harvesting. Yet, somehow, once we’d moved onto the European scene, which we might have expected to be a bigger challenge, it turned out to be the opposite. From age 13 to age 16, so from 2008 to 2011, we enjoyed a lot of success [he won the World Karting Championship in both 2010 and 2011].” When telling such stories he uses the word ‘we’ a lot – almost never ‘I’ – and often he means himself and his dad.

His surge through international karting arrived at precisely the moment when F1 teams were rediscovering the value of investing in young talent, because Lewis Hamilton’s rise through McLaren’s Young Driver Development Programme had provided a compelling example of what could happen when a team identified a driver early and nurtured him with energy and care. “Lewis made his F1 debut with McLaren in 2007, and that was a big success story, especially when they won the F1 World Championship together in 2008. However, F1 at that time wasn’t as financially buoyant as it is now. A couple of teams were making money; the majority were actually losing money. So there wasn’t much money available to invest in junior driver programmes, but I think McLaren’s success with Lewis reignited other F1 teams’ interest in investing in young talent, and that timing was very handy for me because that was the exact moment when I was starting to win and kind of dominate in karting.

“So there was a lot of interest in me from various F1 teams and F1 driver management groups at that time. I’m not exactly sure how my first meeting with McLaren was organised but I remember that it was in 2009, and, because I’d raced in one of the kart teams that Lewis had raced in before, the connection was probably made via Lewis’s dad [Anthony Hamilton] and Martin Whitmarsh [the McLaren team principal]. We were delighted to sign with McLaren and we decided to work with McLaren on mapping out my future. A year later Ron Dennis [McLaren chairman] began to take an interest in my career development, too.”

McLaren represented not only a backer but also a bridge between talent and destiny. For a driver from a normal family, that support was transformational. It enabled de Vries to climb the traditional ladder through Formula Renault 2.0, Formula Renault 3.5, GP3 and Formula 2: the essential proving grounds in which so many hopefuls either establish themselves or disappear.

“I’d say that 70% of my costs were covered by McLaren, which was great, because without that I wouldn’t have been able to do all those feeder series. But after McLaren’s F1 World Championship success of 2008, with Lewis, things began to decline for them a bit, a few of their sponsor-partners began to leave, and F1 wasn’t yet enjoying the commercial explosion that it’s enjoying today. As a result it became less straightforward for an F1 team, even a big and famous one like McLaren, to be a profitable franchise. So their focus inevitably shifted to different areas – like F1 car performance, quite understandably – and putting money into a young driver wasn’t seen as a priority.

“I grew up in a family in which racing was a passion – my father’s passion specifically”

“Then, as the years rolled by, Martin left [in mid-2014], Ron left [in late 2016], and eventually the financial support that I’d always had from McLaren came to an end. It didn’t mean the end of our relationship, because we continued to work together for two more years – and actually I’m doing some work for them again now, as it happens, which is great – but I obviously had a tough time after I lost McLaren’s financial backing. So those were challenging years, character-building years, because now I had to fight my own battles.”

For many drivers, that would have been the point at which the dream began to fade. A driver can win races, impress engineers and demonstrate genuine potential, yet still find himself or herself without the budget required to continue. De Vries’ career was a case in point and he duly entered a period during which survival became the immediate objective, and F1 – once his sole focus – began to look increasingly unreachable.

“I understood very quickly that, without McLaren’s financial backing, my path to my ultimate goal – F1 – had suddenly become a lot longer than I’d anticipated. In the winter of 2016 to 2017, for example, I had nothing lined up, nothing at all. I’d tested for Audi in DTM in December 2016 and that looked like it was going to go ahead, and I actually thought I was going to end up going in a touring cars direction. But then Audi withdrew from the World Endurance Championship and suddenly they had plenty of ex-WEC drivers available to fill their DTM seats, so that ended that possibility.

“Then Ferrari reached out because they wanted a replacement for Gianmaria Bruni in their WEC team. They organised a shootout at Vallelunga, on my birthday [February 6, 2017] actually, which went very well, and that dialogue went all the way to the point that we exchanged contracts.

“But in the background I was still pushing for an F2 drive, because I knew that F2 should be my priority target, and it wasn’t until late February 2017 that I finally got an F2 seat sorted, with Rapax. I had only a third of the necessary budget but I decided to take a risk, go ahead anyway, and see how it developed. But, obviously, starting a season with only a third of the budget, I mean, you know you’re going to face trouble very soon.

“If you want to excel in anything in life, you need to dig deep and overcome tough obstacles”

“But my philosophy at the time was: if I step away from the F2-to-F1 direction now – and do DTM or WEC or something – I’ll never be able to get back, and at 22 I felt I was too young to give up on my F1 dream. So I continued to look for backing wherever I could find it, and in the end I managed to get backing from [Indonesian fast food mogul] Ricardo Gelael. The following year, 2018, his son Sean, who’s a good friend of mine, raced with me in F2 for Prema, and again the Gelael family helped me out. Then in 2019 I raced in F2 for ART. But those years – 2016, 2017 and 2018 – were very tough. It felt like live or die, and after a while I stopped even dreaming about F1. All I was trying to do – desperately – was find the money to continue in F2. To be honest, the Gelael family saved my career, and I’ll always be grateful to them for that.”

There is a particular kind of resilience required to remain committed to a dream after that very dream has become almost too painful to contemplate. De Vries’ career during those years was not fuelled by fantasy; rather, it was powered by fortitude. He was no longer expecting the straight route to F1 that all junior champions hope for. Instead, he was fighting simply to remain on the road. Nonetheless, when I ask him whether he now looks back on that period and recognises how truly remarkable it was that he was able, without the assistance of a manager, to find the funding to keep his career alive, he is characteristically measured. There is pride, but no vanity.

“I’ll humbly say that I’m proud of it. But I’m also aware that if you want to excel in anything in life, you need to dig deep, you need to overcome tough obstacles and you need to be strong, and I know I’ll have harder battles to fight in the future. But, yes, I’m definitely proud of it and it definitely shaped me. Having said that, I wouldn’t say I was completely alone. I still had my dad, because he was always pushing me, even though he didn’t really know how to get me to F1.”

That final point is revealing. Nyck’s father could and did provide love and encouragement, but rare indeed is the family that can navigate the political stumbling blocks that litter the road to F1. I guess an example of that rarity is the role that Keke Rosberg played for his son Nico, which required the 1982 F1 world champion to provide for his son time, expertise, energy, contacts and money. Or, to put it another way, achieving success in motor sport has long been about finding the optimal blend of speed and circumstance, and de Vries’ arrival at the top level would require both.

When he won the 2019 F2 championship with ART, he had achieved what every aspiring F1 driver is told he must achieve. Yet the reward that often if not always follows F2 success – an immediate promotion to F1 – did not in his case arrive. Was he gutted about that, I wonder? “Not at all. I was realistic about it. I understood that there had been quite a few F2 graduates to F1 recently, so there was likely to be very little opportunity for me at that particular time – and, frankly speaking, if I’d won the F2 championship a bit earlier, rather than in my third year in the series, I might well have been able to force my way into F1 earlier, but for many reasons that didn’t happen. So, actually, my focus in terms of sourcing a drive for 2020 was still on alternatives to F1.”

There is no bitterness in the way he recounts that turn of events – and here we encounter two of the most striking things about the de Vries mindset: he is able to acknowledge disappointment without allowing disappointment to define him, and he is able to pick himself up after a setback and get going again. “But what I did do, F1-wise, was start doing simulator work for Mercedes, which was organised by [Mercedes talent scout] Gwen Lagrue and George Russell, who was already in F1 at Williams. That then led to me winning a place in the Mercedes Formula E team. I had a meeting with Toto Wolff and he was very clear. He made no promises beyond Formula E whatsoever and I felt like that direction was the right step for me at the time. Also, having now moved totally away from McLaren, I was able to embrace Mercedes fully, and I trusted them and I felt that, via my work in their F1 simulator and via my racing in their Formula E team, I was growing into the Mercedes family.”

“I’d accepted that F1 was probably never going to happen for me. Now suddenly it was happening”

The irony is that the detour away from F1 became one of the most important chapters of his development. Formula E was not a consolation prize; it was a championship in which he learned a different kind of racing intelligence, one that demanded precision, adaptability and strategic awareness. It also produced the kind of results that could not be ignored. “You’re being a bit modest,” I venture. “You weren’t merely racing in Mercedes’ Formula E team – you won the Formula E championship in 2020/2021, with wins at Riyadh and Valencia, and you won two more Formula E races the following season, at Riyadh again and Berlin.”

“That’s right, I did,” he replies, allowing himself a bashful chuckle. It is an unusually unadorned remark in response to a question about a major achievement, but perhaps that simplicity is revealing, for de Vries has always been more interested in the work than in the applause. Not surprisingly, he quickly moves on. “Yes – and, which was great, during that time I was given the opportunity to test the Mercedes F1 car, at the end of the 2020 season, in Abu Dhabi, then I was made Mercedes F1 reserve driver for 2021, then I got the opportunity to do three F1 practice sessions in 2022, for Williams in Barcelona, for Mercedes at Paul Ricard and for Aston Martin at Monza.”

Monza was the big pivot, I suggest. “Yes – because Alex Albon got appendicitis, so I was selected to race his Williams.” The circumstances were unusual, perhaps almost cinematic. A driver who had spent years waiting for an apparently immovable door to budge suddenly found one flung wide-open right in front of him when another driver fell temporarily ill. What is more, he delivered: he finished ninth, scoring points on his F1 debut.

Mercedes head honcho Toto Wolff was unstinting in his praise: “What else could he have done in terms of performance than what he’s shown today? He had no training, he jumped straight into FP3 in a car that he hadn’t driven before, and I think that really showed what he’s capable of doing. We perhaps forget how he dominated in F2, and he was absolutely great when he won the Formula E championship.”

“I knew what the Red Bull and AlphaTauri culture was like: swim or sink, hit or miss, all or nothing”

Williams team principal Jost Capito’s summary was briefer but no less glowing: “He did a great job, fantastic in fact, and he so much deserved this chance.”

“It was a big mix of emotions,” says de Vries now, four years later. “I’d done free practice with Aston Martin on the Friday, then the call from Williams came the following morning. Coincidentally, my father was in Monaco that weekend, so when he found out on the Saturday that I’d be making my F1 debut he drove from Monaco to Monza to watch me. When I saw him in the F1 paddock, we both became a bit emotional. It was just a very special moment. We both recognised that at last we were about to fulfil our F1 dream but, in addition to the emotion, I also felt so very grateful for the chance.”

The image of Nyck’s father driving from Monaco to Monza, fuelled by devotion, pride and hope, is to my mind an almost perfect symbol of their entire journey together: the parent who bought the first kart, believed in his son before there was evidence and arrived just in time to witness their jointly nurtured dream finally become reality. “To be honest, I had my future kind of set out in Formula E and I’d accepted that F1 was probably never going to happen for me, but now suddenly it was happening, via this unexpected gift. I was about to live my F1 dream. Then my debut F1 race went well – I finished ninth – and I was over the moon and on cloud nine if it’s possible to be in both those places at the same time, and I started receiving a lot of really nice WhatsApp messages. But, quite quickly, I also realised that this was my moment to turn this gift into a real shot at my dream, which was F1. In other words, I realised that I had a chance to capitalise. So the enjoyment was actually pretty brief because on the Monday after the race I went back to my laptop and phone and started working.”

“I don’t want to sit here and say we were amazing, or even that we did well, but it all fell into place”

That final sentence tells you as much about de Vries as does any result sheet. Even at the highest emotional point of his career (theretofore) he was already thinking about the next challenge. The F1 dream had arrived unexpectedly, but keeping it alive would require the same qualities that had carried him through every previous setback. “There were only a few 2023 F1 seats left and, although I’d raced well for Williams at Monza in 2022, Williams wasn’t really an option for me because they had American ownership [New York-based private investment firm Dorilton Capital] and they were very keen to run an American driver [Logan Sargeant, from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, duly got the drive]. Pierre Gasly wanted to leave AlphaTauri [which he did, joining Alpine for 2023] and Red Bull didn’t really have on their books an obvious successor to take his AlphaTauri seat. So there was an opportunity for me. And, looking back, I can only be grateful for that opportunity, to race for AlphaTauri, and to live my F1 dream.”

The opportunity was real, but F1 is an unforgiving place and the same intensity that allows hard-nosed teams to win world championships can also create a ruthless environment for drivers attempting to establish themselves. “Unfortunately it didn’t work out and it ended prematurely, but not every chapter in life can be successful,” says de Vries with a shrug. “I guess it’s sad for me personally that the one opportunity that I was looking forward to the most ended up being so short-lived, but I have no regrets or ill feelings towards anyone at Red Bull or AlphaTauri. They gave me a chance. Different people have different ways of working, different approaches and different philosophies, and Red Bull and AlphaTauri expect strong performance straight away. That’s their approach, that’s their philosophy, and in my case that strong performance simply didn’t come quickly enough. OK, the AlphaTauri car – the package – wasn’t competitive, so that made things harder, and in addition to that let’s just say that we didn’t have the right chemistry, so it didn’t work out. That’s kind of it. There’s not much more to say.”

It is difficult not to admire the maturity of that answer, not least because of course there is in fact a lot more to say. Many drivers would feel deeply wounded after losing an F1 seat after only 10 grands prix, especially after spending so much time and effort fighting for the chance to occupy one. De Vries instead chooses perspective. He does not disguise the disappointment, but neither does he allow it to become resentment.

“Say what you like, Nyck, but I really don’t think you were given enough of a chance,” I half ask and half insist.

“Well, you’re entitled to your opinion, but what I’ve said is what I truly feel. They gave me a chance and it didn’t work out. OK, could they have given me a longer chance, and might things have then played out differently? Maybe, but they do things their way, they’ve won many F1 world championships, and it’s worked for them. Do I personally support such an approach? I don’t know. I guess if I was running an F1 team, I’d probably do it differently. For example, I think the Kimi Antonelli example is amazing because it demonstrates a very different approach and philosophy to bringing on and supporting young talent, and that’s the Mercedes way, and it’s clearly working, but there’s not only one road that leads to Rome. So I respect the Mercedes approach and philosophy, and I respect the Red Bull and AlphaTauri approach and philosophy, too. And when my time at AlphaTauri came to an end [after the 2023 British Grand Prix], I was almost relieved to be released from it, in a way.”

Ten races is a very small sample via which to judge any driver, particularly one entering F1 after years away from the traditional feeder-series-to-F1 conveyor belt. Whether more time would have changed the outcome is impossible to know. It might have done, I suggest. “OK, but if I’m very honest, I’m not sure whether I’d have excelled within that environment anyway, even if I’d been given all 22 races. But I think I knew that, going in. I knew what the Red Bull and AlphaTauri culture was like: swim or sink, hit or miss, all or nothing. I accepted it because it was the only chance for me to fulfil my F1 dream. So I have no regrets, honestly, and I firmly believe that everything in life happens for a reason.”

So, once again, he rebuilt. There is a pattern to de Vries’ career that becomes increasingly clear with every chapter: the setback arrives, the disappointment is absorbed, then the work begins again. “Toyota had been kind of with me from 2020, because when I started informally with Mercedes I also signed a test and reserve driver agreement with Toyota’s WEC team. Oh and, by the way, that’s another example of the great support that Mercedes offered me, to give me the freedom to have a link and an affiliation with Toyota, and they did that because they [Mercedes] believe that racing drivers absolutely need to drive. In other words, if a test and reserve driver gets track time in real cars, not only in simulators, it’s to everyone’s benefit.

“So I became a test and reserve driver for Toyota’s WEC team, alongside my Mercedes F1 test and reserve driver duties and my racing for Mercedes in Formula E. I actually did a rookie test in Toyota’s WEC car at the end of 2019 [in Bahrain]. After that I gradually started integrating into the Toyota WEC team and organisation, and it soon became clear that their objective was eventually to promote me to a race seat. And even when I got my surprise chance to race in F1 with AlphaTauri in 2023, they [Toyota] said, ‘Don’t worry, we want the best for you, but if things don’t work out for you in Formula 1 we’ll be ready to welcome you back very happily.’ That kind of support was something I really valued.”

That word, support, appears repeatedly when de Vries discusses the organisations that have mattered most to him. For all the emphasis in motor sport on machinery, technology and engineering excellence, he believes that performance is ultimately a human equation. “Definitely – and when things ended for me in F1, we [de Vries and Toyota] were already in touch, and I knew that I wanted to be working with people like them. I felt that Toyota offered the right environment for me because they offered the support that I value. I think that’s really important. In many high-level sports, every athlete, every player and every driver is so good that the differences are very much in the small details, which include the environment to perform at a top level consistently. I think many sportsmen and sportswomen are good, but the ones that are really good are able to maintain a level of excellence consistently, and a lot of that is dependent on being mentally confident and in a good psychological place.”

That philosophy was rewarded this year at Le Mans, where de Vries finally achieved endurance racing’s ultimate prize. “Obviously, it’s one of the most prestigious races of them all – along with the Monaco Grand Prix and the Indy 500. Every driver knows that from a young age. I’d raced at Le Mans in LMP2 in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 – not for Toyota – so my first Le Mans in the Toyota Hypercar was in 2024, and we came quite close [de Vries finished second, driving alongside Kamui Kobayashi and José María López]. Then, last year, 2025, we weren’t quite competitive enough [de Vries finished fifth, driving alongside Kobayashi and Mike Conway], and this year it happened [alongside Kobayashi and Conway again].”

It did indeed happen, but the victory was not straightforward. Few Le Mans wins ever are. Instead, it unfolded as a dramatic story of survival, timing and patience. “It was exhausting, not so much from an energy point of view but from an emotional point of view. It was a real roller-coaster of emotions. For a long time we thought we were out of contention for the win – then, suddenly, with four or five hours to go, a safety car brought the whole field together and it became a sprint finish. I did the penultimate stint, which was the stint during which we took the lead. And when it came to the final stint, I found that I just couldn’t watch the TV footage and I put my phone away. So I went into my driver’s room, I lay on my bed and I stared at the ceiling. Then, just three minutes before the end of the race, I walked to the garage, we were still leading, and we won.”

“Did you cry?” I ask.

“Oh yes, I did, I did. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I was consumed by this absolutely overwhelming feeling, because I knew that these people [Toyota] had supported me for so long, and we’d trusted one another with total mutual commitment through all that time. They say you don’t choose Le Mans; Le Mans chooses you. I 100% want to acknowledge that that’s the absolute truth, because I wouldn’t even call it luck, but everything needs to go your way, to fall into place in the right way, and that’s what happened for us this year. I don’t want to sit here and say that we were amazing, or even that we did well, but rather that it all just fell into place, and I’m so grateful that after many good years and a few bad years, and such a variety of different experiences in racing, I can now look back and say, well, I won world karting championships, I won Formula Renault championships, I won a Formula 2 championship, I won a Formula E championship, I won Le Mans and I raced in F1. So it’s not too bad.”