Nyck De Vries says “I need to do the start of race scenarios a bit better” after he lost ground at the start of the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
The AlphaTauri driver finished 14th despite a lacklustre start in Jeddah and admitted he was too cautious in the opening stages.
He said: “I’m personally not satisfied with my own job at the start of the race nor the Safety Car restart I think I was not attacking enough and a bit too conservative.
“It was hard for me to judge the balance between managing the tyres and obviously pushing and at this track it appeared to be almost not part of the equation.
“You could almost push flat out and I think in the beginning of the race I was just too conservative and you lose one position, you’re a little bit on the back foot and then you’re stuck in the DRS train and finding yourself stuck in traffic.”
De Vries explained that dirty air was a problem in Jeddah as he failed to pass Guanyu Zhou despite having a pace advantage. He caught the Chinese driver following an aggressive overtake on Logan Sargeant.
“You need to wait a long time before the train breaks up and then you can start to race and attack and I think I just didn’t do a good enough job there.
“At the end of the race the last 12 laps when I was catching Zhou it was literally just qualifying laps every lap.
“I felt the pace was decent in that phase and I was catching Zhou but when you get within 1.5 seconds you immediately feel the dirty air when you run against the wall, so it shows how important those race start scenarios are to make the ground to kind of settle in your position and have the track position.
The 28-year-old explained that he is making steps forward despite the AlphaTauri lacking in pure pace behind their midfield rivals.
“You’ve got to be honest though and look at the whole picture because yesterday we were discussing fighting for Q2.
“But then when I did my personal analysis, I’m thinking if you actually take the cars pace we probably didn’t deserve to be in Q2, and I think we just need a little extra push to be a bit more in the midfield and then capitalise on others mistakes, but I feel like I’m personally progressing.
“I definitely feel stronger than Bahrain and a bit more comfortable but I have a bit more learning to do.”
