Frederik Vesti is 24 and he is Mercedes’ reserve driver. He attends the Grands Prix from behind the scenes, he helps Kimi Antonelli and George Russell through their season, and a large part of his work happens in the simulator. “I work hard in that tool, I know it better than anyone,” he told Ekstra Bladet.
Nathan read the sentence three times, then paused his sim.
Hang on. He has the best simulator in the world, a badge, a chair that doesn’t creak, and the thing that makes him miserable is that they won’t let him out. I have the exact opposite: nobody is stopping me from anything, I just have a bedroom in Genk. The job exists, I checked, and here’s someone doing it and staring at the door.
Vesti also says he asks Andy Shovlin, Mercedes’ trackside engineering director, every two weeks when he’ll get to drive the car again. Nathan thinks that frequency is reasonable. He himself sends a fresh application every season, with his two thousand four hundred laps of Spa and his 1:41 attached.
He ran the numbers his own way this morning, on softs: between the lap he puts in cold and the one he puts in after twenty minutes of running, there are four hundredths. Four hundredths that only exist because somebody let him run for twenty minutes. That’s exactly the variable the Dane is talking about, except that at Vesti’s end the variable is called the calendar.
And then there’s this line, from the same interview: “I can’t imagine anything more brutal than standing there watching 22 cars go round while I’m not allowed to drive myself.” At Nathan’s place, watching twenty-two cars go round is called Sunday afternoon, and he rather likes it.
So basically, the closer you get to the car, the more it hurts. That’s a curve I hadn’t modelled. I’m sending the application in again anyway. In theory.
It’s true, we checked: Nextgen-Auto.
