Nyck de Vries has revealed the moment he was told that he would be making his debut in Formula 1 as Williams scrambled for a last-minute replacement for Alex Albon.
The British-Thai racer was due to be competing as normal at this weekend's Italian Grand Prix. He completed both practice sessions on Friday, but never got into his car the following day as he was struck by appendicitis and taken to hospital for surgery.
It left the team in need of a last-minute replacement, and so de Vries was drafted in. The Dutchman is reserve driver for Mercedes and was in the paddock having taken part in FP1 for Aston Martin. He has also practiced for Williams this year, so at least has some experience behind the wheel of the FW44.
"I was having a coffee in the Paddock Club for an appearance, and it was quite early in the morning," he later revealed. "I was watching the F3 podium with a cappuccino. And then [Mercedes chief strategist] James Vowles gave me a ring, and I had to come down quickly to Mercedes, and everyone was pretty happy.
"I kind of tried to manage expectations a little bit, saying let's wait. So then I went down to Williams and unfortunately Alex was ill, but hopefully he will be back soon and recover quickly.
"And then during the FP3 briefing, it kind of became clear that it was my duty to be in the car for FP3 and the rest of the weekend. This all happened only one and a half hours prior to FP3, so there was not a lot of time to quickly get my head into it."
After acclimatising himself to the car against during that final practice session, de Vries finally saw his first competitive F1 action during qualifying. And he impressed by reaching Q2 and outperforming team-mate Nicholas Latifi.
He was 13th fastest in the session, but will start his first ever F1 race in eighth place after a swathe of grid penalties for other drivers were taken into account. "Even though I'm hard on myself and think I should have done a better job, that is great," de Vries continued.
"But I also want to make sure we do our homework tonight and get ready and hopefully we can build our race, have a good start, have a good first few laps, and then get into it, find a bit of a rhythm. I obviously have no clue I didn't do any long running whatsoever. And then yeah, maybe dream of a point."
