Oscar Piastri’s fifth pole position of the season sees him draw first blood in the closing chapter of his championship battle with teammate Lando Norris.
It took a qualifying thriller to send Piastri to the front of the grid for the first time since the Spanish Grand Prix, six races ago.
But the result, after a weekend being a step behind Norris, was predictable Piastri — always calm and constantly in control.
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Pole is extremely valuable around narrow Zandvoort, but Norris alongside him on the front row means the work is far from finished.
The Briton still has a chance to reassert himself as the form driver at this track and reduce his championship deficit to two points or less.
With the rest of the field so far behind, this will almost certainly be a straight fight — the perfect race to set the tone for the championship run-in.
PIASTRI TAKES BIG WIN AT NORRIS STRONGHOLD
In an analysis of the final 10 circuits on the calendar, Zandvoort was always in the Norris column.
It’s not just that the Briton won here last year. It’s that he destroyed Piastri in qualifying and finished the race 40 seconds up the road — albeit after the Australian had to recover lost ground off the line.
It sits among a handful of circuits at which the Briton has had a firm upper hand on his teammate in recent years, including before Piastri joined the team.
After sweeping all three practice sessions — the final one by a foreboding 0.242 seconds — there was nothing to suggest his advantage had diminished significantly.
And after topping Q2 — he would’ve topped Q1 too had Piastri not set a second time on used softs — it was beginning to look like his comprehensive performance in Austria, the bounce-back race after Canada that got his season back on track.
But at the death, in the session that mattered most, it was Piastri who came through with the goods, pinching what had looked like a predetermined pole position from under Norris’s nose.
“That was the definition of peaking at the right time,” he said. “It was looking like a little bit of a tricky weekend, so to come out with that, I’m pretty stoked.”
In some ways this is very on brand for the Melburnian.
His reputation for incremental gains is now well established. Regularly we see him look a step behind during Friday practice only to emerge a step ahead by qualifying, having used the evening to dissect his weaknesses and turn them into strengths.
But in another way this significantly different — and significantly meaningful in the context of the title battle.
All weekend Piastri has struggled at particular parts of the track. The transition from turn 9 into turn 10 was the biggest difficulty, as was the chicane in the final sector.
On Friday it seemed unlocking those corners would open the path to pole. That’s usually what would happen — he would learn what Norris was doing well and apply that to his own performance.
But that’s not what he did here.
“It’s just been a couple of corners that I’ve not been able to go any faster,” he explained. “I didn’t really go any faster in those corners, but I found some more elsewhere.
“I just improved the parts where I was already not bad and made up the difference that way.
“There are still some things to try and improve and work on, but overall I’m very happy.”
Piastri was faster — as he has been all weekend — in the first sector, but that was thanks principally to the way he tackled the tricky banked turn 3, riding a higher, smoother line that allowed him to take a higher speed at the apex and then gain all the way through the subsequent high-speed bends. He was particularly quick through turn 7, where he lifted less off the throttle than his teammate.
His lead peaked at around 0.13 seconds. It was just enough to neutralise Norris’s gain of roughly the same by the exit of turn 10.
It all then came down to the final true corner, where Piastri was earlier rolling off the throttle and more decisive getting back on it — allowing him to avoid dabbing the brakes — to power over the line an infinitesimal 0.012 seconds quicker than Norris.
That equated to just 74 centimetres around the 4.259-kilometre circuit.
The ball is now back in Norris’s court to respond.
WHY NORRIS SAYS HE’LL NEED ‘MAGIC’ TO BEAT TEAMMATE
Norris kept his disappointment in check following qualifying, insisting that it had been close between him and this teammate all weekend — enough that tiny circumstances were always going to sway the result.
“It’s tricky with the wind; it can easily just favour you or not favour you,” he said. “And yeah, 0.01 seconds is pretty minimal.
“Coming out of the last corner, I’m a little bit up and I lose like 0.02 seconds by the time I get to the start-finish line, and that’s pole position gone for me.
“It’s not like I’ve dominated it, I’ve just been ever so slightly ahead and it’s just switched the other way around for quali.
“There’s not too much to complain about.”
Zandvoort is one of the season’s most sought-after pole positions. This old-school, narrow, non-stop circuit makes overtaking very difficult, so much so that every pole-getter at this track has won the race since it returned to the calendar in 2021.
If the trend continues, those 74 centimetres will turn into a seven-point swing in Piastri’s favour.
Of course Norris had to make an overtake to win the race last year, having lost first place off the line to Max Verstappen.
But the Briton expected it to be much more difficult — perhaps too difficult — to do the same against the sister car.
“[Verstappen] was in a much slower car last year,” he said “Oscar’s in a much quicker car this year, and the hardest guy to normally overtake is your teammate.
“It’s normally pretty difficult to overtake in the first place. It’s even harder to do that behind your teammate, so I’ll see what I can dream of tonight.
“It’s going to take some magic, some good strategy or incredible tyre saving or something.”
This normally isn’t a track conducive to wild strategy gambles. The difficulty overtaking means the one-stop is preferred, reducing the chance of dropping among slower cars.
But this year Pirelli has brought softer tyres, and the pit lane speed limit has been increased to 80 kilometres per hour.
They’re not game changers, but it’s enough to make the two-stop strategy theoretically faster so long as a driver can avoid losing time in traffic.
The McLaren drivers are rare among the leaders to have saved two sets of hard tyres — albeit one of which has been lightly used — to go with their one set of mediums, making a two-stop possible. Most others have just one set apiece of the favoured mediums and hards.
If the McLaren drivers sprint up the road to a healthy early advantage, could one of them roll the dice on an alternative strategy? Could that be the magic Norris needs?
Team boss Andrea Stella was coy about what sort of strategy freedom the drivers would have.
“When it comes to the options from a strategic point of view in between our two drivers, we do have some rules for that,” he said, per Autosport. “I’m not going to share what rules they are, but whatever you have seen so far in terms of how the strategy has been utilised, it’s always been within our rules.”
We know already that the team is open to allowing one driver to build an offset on the other, as Piastri attempted at the first stop in Austria. Different compounds are also allowed, as was the case in Belgium.
In Hungary the team allowed Norris to try a one-stop strategy that proved successful, though it wasn’t targeted at beating Piastri. It’s unclear whether that would be allowed if McLaren drivers were running one-two. Perhaps we’ll find out on Sunday.
Whatever the case, whichever driver is leading in the first stint will get priority and the chance to influence what follows.
It puts massive importance on the first corner, after which overtaking is much more difficult.
Russell and Piastri clash in the pits | 00:32
VERSTAPPEN A THREAT FROM THIRD, SHARES ROW WITH OTHER TEAMMATE
While McLaren will likely be too fast for any other driver to beat them on pure pace, both drivers could be vulnerable to losing track position at the start, especially with Verstappen starting third.
Verstappen has only one medium and one hard available to him, but unusually he also has one fresh set of softs in his cache too.
The Dutchman might use the extra grip of the softs in the first stint to try to get ahead of at least one of the McLaren cars off the line, knowing that the difficulty overtaking will make it easier for him to manage the soft tyre to the required pit stop window.
But Verstappen performing well at home is unremarkable — he’s won this race three times and last year finished second in a car that should’ve finished third.
Far more remarkable is the Red Bull driver who will line up alongside him on the second row — though it’s not his teammate.
Isack Hadjar will start a career-best fourth on the grid after a superb first qualifying session back from the break.
The French rookie has been a qualifying standout this year but entered into a minor funk before the adjournment. Racing Bulls teammate Liam Lawson, himself resurgent, had become a much closer match and in fact had finished ahead in the last three races both drivers finished.
Lawson has scored 16 points from the last four weekends. Hadjar has scored just one.
So the Racing Bulls driver flying so high — and after having lost all of FP2 to a power unit problem — is a massive achievement and an emphatic statement to start the second part of the year.
It was good enough for the usually self-critical 20-year-old to bask in his result.
“I’m very happy,” he said, per ESPN. “Finally I’m quite satisfied with what I did. It was a good job for me.
“It was the car being exactly like I wanted. It was responding really well, especially on that final lap.
“Probably we got a bit lucky with the wind gusts — we need to look at the data — but I pulled an amazing lap and it sticked because the car was great.”
But what’s good news for him is bad news for Yuki Tsunoda.
Tsunoda started the weekend confident that he was on the up. He’d been given his targets by Red Bull Racing management to keep his seat, and though he was adrift of Verstappen through the practice sessions, the deficit looked like a manageable 0.3 seconds.
That margin would have got him into Q3.
Instead Tsunoda was knocked out 12th, his deficit to Verstappen back out to 0.5 seconds.
Correcting for circuit length, it was his biggest deficit to his teammate since the Spanish Grand Prix.
And in an alarming return to his response to that Spanish Grand Prix gap, Tsunoda admitted to not understanding where the difference was being made.
“I have to see where I can improve,” he said. “I was pretty happy with the lap, to be honest, so it’s pretty tough.
“I’ll try my best to score points — at least it’s not too far away.”
A look at the telemetry suggests Tsunoda’s problem could be related to tyre preparation. He was faster than Verstappen through the first three corners and pretty much level at the end of the first sector but begins losing time through the high-speed corners and appears to have nothing left to give for the rest of the lap.
Keeping the RB21’s tyres under control has been an issue for the Japanese driver at previous races.
But whatever the case, it’s a first chance blown to assert his hold on his seat. Hadjar has firmed as the driver who will step up if Red Bull Racing shuffles the deck at the end of the season, and the Frenchman’s superb fourth will have only boosted that position.
Tsunoda will have to score points — which would be his first since finishing 10th at the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix back in May, eight races ago — to salvage this weekend.