Toto Wolff on how Nyck de Vries' departure was linked with Daniel Ricciardo and Sergio Perez

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff feels Nyck de Vries losing his seat at AlphaTauri had more to do with Red Bull wanting to benchmark Daniel Ricciardo for Sergio Perez's seat. The young Dutch driver was in his first official F1 season with AlphaTauri this season but was unceremoniously dropped by the Faenza-based team after just 10 races.

While it is safe to say that the level of performance that was expected from de Vries was just not there. He was always playing catch-up to Yuki Tsunoda and had found it hard to outpace the Japanese driver.

It was during the tire test in Silverstone that Daniel Ricciardo first got his hands on the Red Bull and impressed instantly. Arguably the Australian's level of performance did hasten the call to replace Nyck de Vries.

Talking to SkyF1, Toto Wolff also stressed something similar and insisted that maybe de Vries was replaced a bit too early by Red Bull. He, however, was quick to add that maybe the team was looking to benchmark Daniel Ricciardo for Sergio Perez's seat in the future.

“Maybe he needed more time. If he had been given the season, who knows? Maybe he would have been a really good candidate for the Red Bull seat too. They wanted, I think, to do some benchmarking with Ricciardo to see if Daniel might be able to take Checo’s seat. And once you’ve made that decision, then of course you’ll fall through the cracks,” Wolff explained.

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Sergio Perez undeterred by the imminent Daniel Ricciardo threat

Talking about the imminent Daniel Ricciardo threat, Sergio Perez claimed that he was entirely focused on himself.

In the Mexican driver's view, his primary motive was to return to form.

“It’s in my hands, that’s why I’m focused on myself. I’m a winner and I don’t like having bad weekends. It’s not what I’m here for, I would rather be at home doing something else. I’m here because I know that I can do it and I’ve done it before. People just on the sofa forget how much in the little details that we are. You’ve seen it with other drivers for their teams, they’ve had different periods,” Perez said.

It will be interesting to see how Daniel Ricciardo fares in the second half of the season because there is no doubt that Red Bull will be keeping an eye on how he performs for AlphaTauri.