“I guess I didn’t really come up to speed quickly enough,” De Vries told the Cool Room podcast when discussing his whirlwind F1 stint. “I think there were some situations where the coin could have easily [landed] in my favour, but it didn’t.
“Ultimately, let’s say my bosses didn’t think it was good enough for the time I was there, and they decided to replace me. It was a challenging time because there were a lot of talks publicly about it, and I wasn’t really aware of anything. At least there wasn’t really much of a dialogue with me, personally.
“You pick up everything through the media. During F1 weekends you speak a lot to the media, so basically every weekend since maybe my second weekend, I’d just arrived and I had to answer questions about my future, which felt a little bit out of place – but that’s how it went or can go.”
De Vries, who scored a best result of 12th with AlphaTauri at the Monaco Grand Prix, added that this intense media scrutiny and the already high expectations within the Red Bull camp made for a particularly demanding combination.
“You obviously have the media, so you have external kind of pressure, but you also have internal pressure, and every team deals with that differently,” he commented. “When you have both, it becomes basically a double up.