I think you also have to keep in mind the position that de Vries and redbull is in:

• Redbull is looking for a second verstappen-level driver. That’s always been the case not only for redbull, but all tier 1 teams: Their aspirations are championships, not points or even podiums.
• De Vries is a 28 year old rookie. That’s usually the time that drivers retire or lean on their superior experience to make up for their loss in reaction speed and overall pace. The problem is that De Vries has no experience, while being older than Verstappen by close to three years. The fact that he got to race at all is a miracle: He would have to beat Tsunoda every week by quite a margin to become relevant for RedBull. If he doesn’t become relevant for redbull, then why have him at alpha tauri?

Meanwhile they have a young driver in the form of tsunoda which exists in a limbo due to him having nothing to compare against: He could be the fastest driver on the planet in a trash car, or he could be underdelivering without anyone noticing due to the lack of comparison.
This is bad for two reasons:

1. you don’t know whether tsunoda is an option for redbull
2. you have no idea how good alpha tauri is over all, which is doubly bad considering that they want to make major changes to how alpha tauri operates.

On the other hand, you have a perfectly good Ricciardo sitting on his hands that performed really well at silverstone. Realistically, you aren’t going to lose anything from having Riccardo drive the rest of the season compared to having de Vries drive, but you have to potential upside of more context to the quality of tsunoda and the team, which you wouldn’t get otherwise.

In general I’m more suprised that they ever gave De Vries a chance considering his age and the context to his big achievements:
In formula 2 his stiffest competitor was Nicholas Latifi (He won with 266 vs Latifi’s 214 points) in what can be described as a dud year after the majority of now F1 mainstays had already graduated (he also needed 3 years to win F2, which is never a good sign).
If you have ever seen an formula E race, you will notice that it is quite a chaotic crash-fest with very weird rules and other nonsense. Just not crashing and not driving to quickly can get you really far by surviving the carbon-fiber mayhems and fuel-conservation issues.
To put it into perspective, here are the race records in the year that De Vries won formula E [1st, 9th, retired, retired, 1st, 16th, retired, 9th, retired, 13th, 18th, 2nd, 2nd, 22nd, 8th] or, in short if we ignore all DNFs we get a mean position of 9th!

In short, there’s a reason why Mercedes never even tried to get him an F1 spot: He’s not a bad driver, but being “not a bad driver” is insufficient for a top team like mercedes and redbull. There’s little incentive to put him into any car, even less so nowadays considering his age.

I didn’t see De Vries being replaced so soon, but you’ve been living under a Ric if you didn’t hear about the short leash Marko was giving him. His clock started ticking ages ago and he hasn’t shown anything since then.

What we all really wanted anyway

Unfortunately Riccardo has always had the Problem that he’s inconsistent. He can win races and challenge for the podium. But he can also barely make it to Q2 a few races later.

Not that I blame him for that. It’s just that there are more consistent driver out there.

From The Guardian’s article on this:

The Red Bull team principal, Christian Horner, said at the British Grand Prix that the team were still committed to Pérez. “He’s the type of guy that just needs an arm around his shoulder and you work with him,” he said. Tellingly, in 2020, Horner said of Albon, then also struggling at Red Bull: “We need to be patient with him and we’ll put an arm around his shoulder and make sure he feels he’s got the support.” Albon was replaced at the end of the season by Pérez.

I think AT could prove hes worthy of an RB seat. With Alex showing his worth at Williams there could be a few contenders though.

This is typical of Red Bull. No one should be surprised by this. Hell Kyvatt was ahead of Ricciardo in championship points when they demoted him to Toro Rosso, and then he got replaced again in the middle of the season for Max.

Albon had a short stint at Red Bull, they did Pierre Gasly dirty too.

These are all examples of drivers who showed strong races and have gotten podiums.

Nyck never raced well this year.

I think the contexts are different. De Vries is 28, with three FE world championships, Mick was a proper rookie. After De Vries’ race with Williams, expectations were also a lot higher.

I don’t think firing De Vries this early is fair though, at least 1 full season should be the norm for more experienced rookies. 2 years for recent F2 grads makes sense.

RB and by extension AT also seem to have inconsistent tolerance for driver performance, which makes me think something else is going on behind the scenes.

Because it’s two completely different situations. Yes, Mick has the sympathy bonus because of his name BUT: One was a young driver cutted in the age of 23 after coming directly from F2 after winning it in the second season and showing that he’s evolving. The other one is 28, won F2 in his third year (being older than Mick when he was cutted by Haas), didn’t make it to F1 and didn’t really shine in Formula E while getting lucky to win it 2021 with a randomized qualifying format and a shit show farce in Valencia.

I didn’t see that many crying about Mick, no.

But even if so, hiring Nyck, a relatively old “rookie”, was a bet that his experience from other series would translate well to F1. His performance at Monza was an indication that this could be the case. I was on the Nyck hype train in the beginning of the season too. But clearly he has not performed better than many other rookies, which means that his age and experience are actually working against him. With this in mind it’s not that strange of a decision by AT/RB. By putting Ricciardo in a seat now they can evaluate Yuki, Perez, and Ricciardo better in preparation for next season, to later take a more informed decision about which driver to put in which seat then.

MARKOS BACK! CAREERS END.