Marc Gene
ITALIAN GRAND PRIX 2003
The Williams Monza prelude to de Vries
When Nyck de Vries was called up by Williams on the Saturday morning to race at this year’s Italian Grand Prix, he was already at the circuit. Nineteen years ago, Marc Gene was in bed when he received his call from the British team — and didn’t answer first time! But on second ring, he was up and on the go at the beginning of a whirlwind ride that took him to his best Formula 1 finish and, albeit very briefly, the lead of a grand prix.
There’s another key difference between de Vries’s and Gene’s experiences as Monza stand-ins with Williams. The Dutchman took part in practice on Friday, admittedly in an Aston Martin; the Spaniard wasn’t even at the circuit for much of the first day. Rather, he’d been out and about in nearby Milan with his wife “doing a bit of tourism”.
The Williams test driver travelled to Italy knowing there was a chance he might have to replace Ralf Schumacher after the German had crashed
heavily in testing at Monza in the lead-up to the event. But the chances of a race outing in the Williams-BMW FW25 looked unlikely on the Friday.
“There was no sign that Ralf was feeling unwell,” recalls the former Minardi F1 driver. “If I’d thought there was a chance I was going to race, I obviously wouldn’t have gone into Milan. Maybe at seven the next morning, the phone rings, but I thought it was my alarm. Basically, I turned it off. Three minutes later it
