Dropping Nyck de Vries in favour of Daniel Ricciardo, Dutch racing driver Tom Coronel has warned Red Bull the Aussie “won’t make a difference” with the under-performing AT04.
10 races into his AlphaTauri career, de Vries was sacked by Red Bull with motorsport advisor Helmut Marko citing a failure to improve from race one to race 10.
Out-qualified by his teammate Yuki Tsunoda in all 10 races, and also failing to score any points, the Dutchman was given the boot less than two hours into Ricciardo’s “impressive” Red Bull tyre test.
‘When you will drive for Red Bull as fast as you come in, you can go out’
Weeks later his compatriot Coronel is still irked by the decision.
“That’s just not enough. It’s definitely not enough and we all know that” he told Motorsport.com. “There is hardly anyone who has only ten races to prove themselves and especially not with so little experience in that car.
“I am quite a bit disappointed about that, but on the other hand you know it when you will drive for Red Bull as fast as you come in, you can go out as fast.”
Dropping de Vries and putting Ricciardo in the car, the Aussie finished ahead of Tsunoda at the Hungarian Grand Prix but lost to him at Spa where the Japanese driver scored his third point of this season.
With Tsunoda the only driver to score for the team, AlphaTauri are sitting bottom of the log where they’re six points behind Alfa Romeo.
Coronel has warned: “But Ricciardo is not going to make the difference there either. They will now find this out.”
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‘If Red Bull really have balls, then put Yuki next to Max’
The 51-year-old went on to talk up Tsunoda, saying he believes Red Bull should put the 23-year-old in the car alongside Max Verstappen.
“Yuki is better than we think,” he said. “But yes, if you really have balls, then you put Yuki next to Max.
“He has three years of experience at the end of this season and is good enough with the sister team. Of course, then Max snaps it and that’s done too.”
As for de Vries, the 2020/21 Formula E champion is now looking at his options for the future with Coronel wondering if he’s regretting not pushing for a Williams seat after former team boss Jost Capito expressed his interest.
“Maybe then he would have had a slightly better car,” said the pundit. “That was of course also a bit of his bad luck, that he ended up in the worst car in the field. But yes, those are those guesses, there’s not much you can do about that.
“And don’t forget, last year at this stage of the season Nyck had nothing at all in F1 terms. He had 0.0 at all, so you can also say he got into the highest class of motorsport.”
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