Nyck de Vries said he was rejected four times by Formula 1 teams before the sudden scramble for his signature following his eye-catching debut.
The Dutchman holds a race seat in F1 for the first time and will make his AlphaTauri debut this season, after his 28th birthday. It has been a long time coming for a man who looked a shoo-in for a seat in the premier single seater class after romping to the Formula 2 title in 2019.
But the call never came. As has become a theme in recent times with F2 champions, there was no space in F1 for De Vries. Instead he moved to Formula E with Mercedes where he competed for the next three seasons alongside former McLaren man Stoffel Vandoorne.
Another title was won, in his second FE season, but again it wasn't enough to convince an F1 team to offer him a race seat. It was only after his surprise debut last year that things changed.
In 2022 he was a regular in the F1 paddock, in his role as a Mercedes reserve. He also got behind the wheel of several different cars, taking part in FP1 sessions for the Silver Arrows as well as their engine customer teams Williams and Aston Martin.
The latter opportunity came at Monza and, after the session, it looked as though his duties for the weekend were complete. But when Alex Albon was struck down by appendicitis, Williams needed a last-minute stand-in – De Vries went from swigging coffee in hospitality to a seat fitting in the space of just a few minutes.
The pressure was off considering how little preparation time. Not only did he qualify in the top 10 – after a swathe of grid penalties for other racers were taken into account – but he finished ninth in his first ever F1 race in the worst car on the grid, matching Williams' best result of the entire year.
Suddenly, every team who still had a 2023 race seat vacancy was chasing the Dutchman. After weighing up his options, De Vries signed a Red Bull contract to race for sister team AlphaTauri and, despite all the setbacks, that little bit of hope he still held for an F1 seat paid off.
He told DAY1 : "I had a lot of frustration and that's also been the reason why I was always able to do it all with a lot of pleasure and motivation, because I was very happy with what I did have. Deep down, I always kept a certain faith, despite being rejected four times in the last year.
"In 2021, I was allowed to win the Formula E championship, then we were very close but didn't succeed either. That little bit of hope [speaking to teams] was enough to keep the belief and the drive and not give up."
