Lando Norris was hopeful of putting on a good show for the final Dutch Grand Prix, and the reigning champion didn’t disappoint.
Norris walked away from a strategically thrilling and surprisingly overtaking-happy grand prix in the Netherlands to send off the classic circuit in fine style.
But while the Dutch Grand Prix story ends here, Norris’s story certainly doesn’t.
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His second consecutive victory, after monstering title leader Andrea Kimi Antonelli early in the final stint with eye-popping pace — the result of a well-considered and perfectly executed strategy — was more than just a boost for McLaren morale.
Norris has taken 18 points out of Antonelli’s lead over the last two weekends. He’s up to fourth in the title standings and is fast closing in on the stalled George Russell and Lewis Hamilton.
It’s beginning to feel a lot like belief.
IS THE TITLE ON FOR NORRIS?
If there’s one statistic worth contemplating, it’s this one: 83 points.
That’s Norris’s deficit to Antonelli’s championship lead with 10 or 11 rounds to go.
It sounds like a lot, and it is.
But it’s also a hell of a lot less than Max Verstappen’s 104-point deficit to the championship lead after last year’s Dutch Grand Prix, where there were only nine rounds remaining. He finished the season two points off the lead.
Remember too that Verstappen’s deficit was to Oscar Piastri and that he finished 11 points ahead of the Australian in the final count.
Hulkenberg pulls off epic reflex save | 01:15
It would constitute the greatest comeback in history — and, on Antonelli’s part, the biggest ever lead loss — but last year proved that big things are possible in modern Formula 1.
“I clearly have a very, very strong car now,” Norris told Sky Sports. “It’s been amazing.
“I’m very pleased and happy for the team to see how much progress we’ve made.”
But he remained cautious about defending his title.
“If you want me to be confident and you want me to say, ‘Yeah, I can still fight for the championship’, I need more than what I have now.
“That’s not to say that I’m not pleased that I can win a race here and win in Budapest, but I know what’s needed in a season. I know what kind of a car I need. I know what level I need to perform at.
“I feel like I’m doing a very good job and the team is doing an incredible job, but you can’t ever relax in a situation like this.
“I’m very pleased, but there’s a lot of work ahead, and it’s a long season to go.”
There are some circumstantial elements to Norris’s double victory.
The first is that Hungary and Zandvoort are similar circuits, and both have been favourable tracks for McLaren for years.
The second is that his win in the Netherlands wasn’t as convincing as his victory in Budapest, with Ferrari and Mercedes both arguably faster, at least at certain points in the race.
McLaren must still prove this car works at different circuit types before letting the lid off.
The next race at flat-out Monza, for example, will on paper be one of the car’s least favourite circuits.
Norris’s mission will be assisted by Antonelli being likely to serve an engine penalty there, but if he can walk away having been competitive, regardless of any points swing, that would really make things interesting.
‘I had nothing, I don’t know why…’ | 00:51
WHAT HAPPENED TO PIASTRI?
Zandvoort had the makings of a good weekend for Piastri, who had been on Norris’s pace throughout — or at least right up until the middle of the grand prix.
A good second start — after the Verstappen red flag — got him into a podium position ahead of Russell with a gutsy and opportunistic pass, and on the hard tyre he was setting competitive times relative to Norris on softs. His first trophy since the Miami Grand Prix back in May looked achievable.
A slow pit stop dumped him back behind Russell and appeared to scupper his chances, but then his pace nosedived anyway, and he played no further meaningful part in a race his teammate eventually dominated.
“Disappointing, obviously,” he told Sky Sports. “I think that the first lap was good after the red flag, then the first stint felt okay, then after that I had nothing. I don’t know why, but plenty to look into.
“The pace [is not there]. I don’t really have any more answers other than that at the moment.
“At the moment it’s been pretty challenging.”
A year ago Piastri looked on course for the world title. He’s now a distant seventh in the standings ahead of only Isack Hadjar among the frontrunning drivers — and he’s now a stinging 55 points behind Norris.
Team boss Andrea Stella theorised that the conditions of the weekend worked against Piastri’s driving style in a car the Australian has already struggled to gel with.
“The tyres today were a little tricky,” he told Sky Sports. “We saw with Antonelli, we saw with the second stint of Oscar there are times it was difficult to switch them off.
“The tyres were not straightforward this weekend … at times the tyres could just go off completely, like it happened in the second stint for Oscar. It was difficult to understand.
“We know that with Lando, when we have these tyres that actually don’t have as much grip is when he expresses his best talent compared to other drivers … it’s kind of his natural ground.
“I think Lando probably just did a better job than anybody else from this point of view, and he deserved the victory.”
Piastri spoke ahead of the mid-season break of having the chance to experiment with his driving style to make it work with the car given he’s out of title contention. At 138 points adrift, there’s no doubt that his championship hopes are all but lost.
Painful, though, is the idea that his teammate might yet rescue his title defence from the fire for a second time.
CARNAGE as Verstappen suffers huge wreck | 01:22
MERCEDES FLIRTS WITH TEAM ORDERS
We’ve been wondering if — when — the cordial Mercedes rivalry might begin to simmer.
We got a tiny glimpse of friction at the Dutch Grand Prix.
Russell started the weekend on the front foot, winning the sprint from pole and qualifying on the front row, beating his title-leading teammate throughout.
But then a series of bad starts in the grand prix cost him places — to Antonelli and then Piastri — cutting him adrift of the lead fight, though he never looked like he genuinely had the pace to go with his teammate or Norris at the front.
Good fortune, however, came Russell’s way in the shape of Piastri’s slow stop and then Antonelli’s inexplicably uncompetitive hard tyres, which triggered the Italian to make an extra stop late in the race and drop behind.
Suddenly Russell was unexpectedly second and in with a chance of taking points off his teammate.
But Antonelli was much faster on fresher rubber and closed in on Russell in no time at all.
That’s when the politicking started.
Russell argued that Antonelli should be kept behind him to help protect him from the faster Ferrari drivers, who were also closing fast on fresher rubber. He posited it was the only way to protect a double podium finish.
Of course it was self-interest at play. Antonelli had already been overtaken by Norris while he was bottled behind the slower Lewis Hamilton. Mercedes was never going to allow it again.
Russell was told to yield, and after a brief attempt to argue back, he acquiesced — and he later admitted that it was fair enough, Antonelli having been ahead of him before switching strategies.
“We’ve always said as a team when we’re on different strategies we’re never going to fight and we’re always going to invert [positions],” he added. “That’s always just been our rules.”
In reality the choice was between a guaranteed Antonelli podium and perhaps no podium places at all — that is, not really a choice.
“Finishing second and third is damage limitation, I would say,” Toto Wolff told Sky Sports.
“It seems that we had the pace to win the race, but then for unclear reasons, we lost so much performance on both cars — probably more on Kimi.”
He denied there was any hidden motive in the swap — that the team was attempting to protect the title leader.
With a healthy 59-point lead, were not at that stage yet.
But McLaren and Norris’s recent form has been good enough that Wolff might be beginning to prepare himself for a difficult conversation sooner or later.
Hamilton EXPLODES at Leclerc & Ferrari | 01:40
FERRARI COUNTS THE COST OF GROWING ERROR COUNT
It’s just so Ferrari, isn’t it.
The Italian team genuinely felt as though it was building towards a title challenge in the races before the mid-season break, with unexpectedly strong performances at what should have been weak circuits considerably raising hopes.
It underperformed in Hungary, where it should have gone well, but maybe that was just a blip at a McLaren favourite circuit.
But now it’s happened again, with Ferrari miraculously managing to avoid the podium despite having what was arguably the quickest car in race conditions.
Not only that, but it managed to blow its chances of a trophy by uniquely — but somehow characteristically — bungling strategies for both drivers simultaneously.
“The pace was decent in the race, but we had some issues with the execution,” team boss Frédéric Vasseur told Sky Sports understatedly.
“We have to now have a deep look at what we did and what we did wrong.”
Hamilton will surely have some answers in the debrief.
The seven-time champion was in good form in the race, making the most of an offset strategy that saw him run long before his first stop, giving him fresher tyres than his rivals for the rest of the afternoon.
But then he came up behind Leclerc in the middle of the race, the Monegasque attempting to build his own offset to pass Russell.
Met by these two competing objectives, the pit wall appeared to freeze.
Hamilton was furious, which perhaps triggered the team to pit Leclerc — which infuriated the Monegasque, who got no meaningful undercut and thus had his race ruined.
“I didn’t really understand why we had to box so close to George’s pit stop, because that really was signing up to finish behind George,” he told Sky Sports.
Ironically Hamilton was then left out too long before his final stop, costing him even more time and contributing to him falling short of overhauling Russell for the podium.
He started the weekend 50 points behind Antonelli and ends it 59 points adrift and down to third in the standings.
He kept himself upbeat speaking to Sky Sports after the race, but he underlined that his frustrations had more to do with the bigger picture than the specific clumsy scenario.
“I’m here to win, and I really believe that this team can win,” he said.
“To win championships you have to pick up every point, and the last few races have been difficult with penalties and stuff, and then today I lost several seconds behind Charles, which I think would have made the difference at the end.
“We’ll take it offline. My goal is to try and lead this team to the top of the championship. We’ve got some work to do for sure.”
That’s quite the understatement.
McLaren blunder undoes Piastri magic | 01:33
VERSTAPPEN CAN’T BOW OUT OF DUTCH GP IN STYLE
The Dutch Grand Prix was revived in 2021 for one reason: Max Verstappen.
Verstappen is a national hero in his home country for his on-track exploits, and the historic Zandvoort track — host of 30 grands prix between 1952 and 1980 — sought to capitalise by returning Formula 1 to the Netherlands.
The Dutchman won the first three return events in succession, sending the partisan crowd into raptures each time.
He didn’t quite manage to send the race out in the same style.
Already on the back foot in a car that never looked competitive at this circuit, Verstappen made a highly uncharacteristic mistake on the first lap, spinning his car across the final corner and slamming into the concrete barrier.
What was already bad enough could’ve been much worse when his car rebounded onto the track, but remarkably none of his rivals hit him — including Gabriel Bortoleto, who repeated almost exactly the same mistake just seconds later.
“It was of course still quite wet in that corner,” he told Sky Sports, referencing the rain that lashed the track in the hour before the start. “As soon as I was going through the corner at one point I could see a little bit of a dry line coming, and I thought from that point on I could accelerate again.
“But then it suddenly accelerated a lot, and it caught me out, as simple as that.”
An ignominious end to his career as the home driver — and to the weekend on which he confirmed he would stay with Red Bull Racing for another four seasons at least.
Will it be indicative of his season, though?
You can never write Verstappen off, and there are still circuits remaining on the calendar that have historically suited him very well.
But it was telling that he’s already talking about switching focus to next year and ensuring the 2027 car doesn’t have the same vices.
“It’s not going to be the most straightforward end to the season, but we’ll try to do the best we can.”