At Cape Town in February 2023 Frederic Bertrand was sat, half slumped on a chair at the back of the Mahindra garage.
He looked like a man with a significant weight on his shoulders. As I approached he clocked me, exhaled and rolled his eyes. I didn’t take it personally, but clearly the last person he wanted to speak too after both of his cars had been forced to withdraw from the race was me.
But he did, and he did his best to explain the situation. To explain also how this had to be a rock bottom for the team which had ironically started that season with a remarkably surprising pole position at Mexico City with Lucas di Grassi.
However, that was the mother and father of false dawns for Mahindra and Bertrand. Cape Town was the absolute nadir. From there surely the only way was up?
Kind of. There were still the painful hurdles of both Rowland and di Grassi’s exits. Also, the disconnection from Abt CUPRA which had swallowed one disappointment too many. Mahindra and Bertrand were now on their own and they had to rebuild.
This they did over two subsequent seasons with new recruits Edoardo Mortara and Nyck de Vries, as well as several new senior engineering hires, notably Tony Ross as a consultant and former Venturi and Maserati tech head Jeremy Colancon.
At Monaco, on a sunny Saturday, all the hard graft became worth it as de Vries took the chequered flag and ended a 1758-day victory famine.
When Bertrand took over from the effervescent Dillbagh Gill as the Mahindra TP in October 2022, there were plenty of wide eyes at a senior FIA manager getting the position, something that Bertrand jovially acknowledged as he savoured de Vries’ success.
“I don’t know how many people in the pit lane would have bet that the next FIA guy can manage and get things done together,” said Bertrand, who’s appointment at Mahindra direct from the FIA raised a lot of eyebrows in late 2022.
“But no, it’s a teamwork and the good thing is since day one the people who have stayed in the team and the people who have joined have understood the project and believed in it and then put the maximum effort in, and that’s why it started to pay off.
“But it’s never something done, so we need to keep pushing because otherwise the moment you start to think you’re there, you start to fall down, and that’s probably one of the things which has changed a lot in the team. That nobody gets satisfied and everybody wants to push, without being too optimistic or too ambitious, it’s more we understand that if we want to follow the trend of the top teams, it’s full push all the time.
What is so exciting also is to make the team change and turn around but also the pride because the impact in India of the victory of Nyck is just huge. It’s a long time since I got so many nice messages on my phone and all the social media ones too.
So that’s the exciting part and now the reward is also there. Up to now we had good results with podiums and everything which was showing the way, but we were missing that win, so it’s good that it happened, it took a little bit of time, but it’s good.
De Vries’ powerful reset mentality
Nyck de Vries entered the present season as one of the favourites to challenge at the top of the points table with a car that was clearly one of the top all-round performers on the grid. But it didn’t go to plan.
A fractious opening race at Sao Paulo last December saw a strong qualifying frittered away at the first corner when he hit both Dan Ticktum and teammate Edoardo Mortara, somehow not getting a penalty for that particular error.
There have been other errors too, notably in Jarama when he clouted the back of Pascal Wehrlein’s Porsche when building a strong race where he should have been in the hunt for a podium at least.
But it all came together at Monaco in the first race with an excellent qualifying in which he just missed out on pole to a flying Dan Ticktum. That was backed up by a very patient race, in which he sat in the CUPRA Kiro’s tow and then executed a smart PitBoost and attack mode strategy to take a reasonably straightforward victory.
Part and parcel of de Vries’ excellence is his capability to “reset” according to his boss at Mahindra, Frederic Bertrand.
“I think for himself and for the team it was a big win because we needed these points also to build up on our global ranking,” said Bertrand.
“The good thing with Nyck is that he has that state of mind where he resets very easily of what happened and then he moves to the next one, so that’s definitely a strength that he cultivated and it’s something which makes him very strong.
But then when he has to be there he’s delivering, to be honest the beginning of the season issues is a bit of him and a bit of us and a bit of bad luck, so there is nothing where we could blame him or say he was doing a bad job and sometimes we were not.
“So, we are very happy that for this one everything came together, the little luck you need, the little execution, perfection and his driving style, so that was really good.”
