Nyck de Vries as a volleyball player? He tried!

Nyck de Vries is a late bloomer. It was not until he was 28 that he made his entrance as a regular driver in Formula 1 at AlphaTauri. However, the Dutch driver would have been close to being active in a completely different sporting discipline. In his youth, he tried many other sports.

Many days a year, young Nyck spent in Italy, the core of European karting, he told Formula 1 Magazine. With his father and sister, he chose the southern European country as his base of operations in the run-up to a new season, only sporadically returning to the Netherlands for a year. To pursue a successful career in racing, De Vries even skipped high school.

Karting was his passion, although he loved more sports. De Vries, currently 1.67 metres tall, even played volleyball for a while, because his sister did too. Father De Vries was also a volleyball player, he even became Dutch champion. He also sometimes played hockey at school, which he also enjoyed. He also enjoyed playing tennis.

But when the choice really had to be made, it was karting: "My father said: 'You can only do one thing well and you have to do this. Everything else is fun, but we are going to do one thing well'," said De Vries.