De Vries impresses: 'He is very good'

Nyck de Vries will not be able to find a seat in Formula 1 in 2022, but he will however participate in Formula E next season as the reigning champion. As his team Mercedes EQ is quitting after the upcoming campaign, the Dutchman is already looking to the future. In 2023, an adventure in IndyCars might await him.

Successful test

This week De Vries tested an IndyCar for the first time. At the Sebring circuit he drove 62 laps for Meyer Shank Racing-Honda. During the test with four drivers, including his Mercedes EQ team mate Stoffel Vandoorne, the Dutchman set the fastest time. "He's very, very good," team founder and co-owner Michael Shank told Motorsport.com. "It’s hard to work out where he might end up because he’s still working on his life and career in Europe somewhat, but we wanted to have a look at him just to gauge him for the future.”

The participating teams were only given four sets of tires; and MSR chose to use those sparingly. As a result, De Vries drove fewer laps than the other drivers. “You could burn through four sets in just the morning if you wanted to,” remarked Shank, “so we evenly spaced them out and didn’t do a lot of long runs on old tires. From 1.00 through to 3.30pm you’re just doing nothing really."

Beasts

Shank calls the cars De Vries drove 'beasts'. "I think it was [Romain] Grosjean who said these are ‘steering monsters’, and that was Nyck’s comment after he came in after his first run – like, ‘This thing is ridiculous in terms of steering effort.’ So that’s the biggest thing for these guys to get used to, and then it’s the tires – totally different from what they’re used to."

The big question is whether De Vries will eventually make the move to IndyCars. Shank can't anticipate that. Still: “So yes, he was very impressive. His feedback was very, very good – you can tell he’s been around really professional organizations for the last four or five years – and he’s sure of himself and he understands the terminology we use, and he just gets on with it. We waited a little while to go out, so Nyck was 20-30 laps behind those other guys and in his first five laps he went straight to P1."