In a team like Red Bull, with minds like Christian Horner, Adrian Newey, and Helmut Marko—and their fiery personalities—there are bound to be disagreements from time to time. In the past, there have been disagreements on which driver to call up from its sister team, AlphaTauri, into the main seat at Red Bull. but this time, Helmut Marko admitted to making a mistake when it came to a seat at AlphaTauri.

After Pierre Gasly left the Red Bull family to join Alpine, someone had to replace him at Alpha. According to the Faenza-based team principal Franz Tost, it was a choice between Mick Schumacher and Nyck De Vries. While Tost was gunning for Schumacher, Marko brought De Vries on a $2.19 million contract to partner with Yuki Tsunoda. While that hasn’t worked out too well for Tost in terms of performance, he can take some consolation from the fact that he wasn’t the only one who thought De Vries was arguably the wrong option.

Christian Horner wasn’t confident about Nyck De Vries

AlphaTauri is Red Bull’s sister team. Although both are individual entities, the Red Bull administration still controls Alpha’s decisions to a large extent. Helmut Marko has stressed many times that Alpha is a team Red Bull uses to test out its junior drivers and to see if they have the potential to make it to the main seat at Red Bull. So when De Vries, who was affiliated with Mercedes, was given a seat at Alpha, it confused people because he was neither a Red Bull driver nor a junior.

Considering his underwhelming performances this year and the fact that he’s consistently been outperformed by Tsunoda, Marko opened up about his decision to choose De Vries. While speaking on the Inside Line podcast, Marko was asked if he ever had disagreements with Horner on driver changes. He replied, “Not often, but sometimes we do. The last one, I would say, is Nyck de Vries. And at the moment, it looked like he was right.”

Marko alluded to the fact that as AlphaTauri is part of the Red Bull family, all opinions come into the fray for decision-making including Horner’s. He stated, “Basically, it’s AlphaTauri, so it’s not completely. But as we are a big family I would say we are at least getting opinions. And he [Christian Horner] was not a fan of Nyck de Vries.”

Although Nyck signed a contract possibly till the end of 2024, if he doesn’t improve his performances over the season, there’s a high possibility he could be replaced.

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Could Daniel Ricciardo replace De Vries?

After the British GP, Daniel Ricciardo will finally get the opportunity to drive the RB19 at Pirelli’s tire test. Apart from being a tire test, it is also a test by Helmut Marko & Co. to see if Ricciardo still has it in him to race in F1. If he does well, there’s a high possibility he’ll replace De Vries. But not a lot of people are too pleased with the idea because it’ll be similar to the De Vries situation. Although Daniel is a Red Bull driver, he’s no longer a junior.

Red Bull has a line of talented junior drivers waiting to get their chance in F1. Apart from Ricciardo, Liam Lawson and Ayumu Iwasa are also in contention for the seat at Alpha. But if Ricciardo does manage to take the seat, many people think it’ll be like losing out on the great potential of Lawson and Iwasa. 

Do you think Red Bull made a mistake choosing Nyck De Vries?

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