McLaren driver Lando Norris claimed his second victory of the F1 2024 season in the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort.
Norris recovered quickly from a poor start to dominate in the Netherlands, with Red Bull’s Max Verstappen forced to settle for second at his home race and Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc in third. Here are our conclusions from Zandvoort…
Conclusions from the 2024 Dutch Grand Prix
Lando Norris is entering the most crucial phase of his F1 career so far
Lando Norris has often quipped over the years that the sea of orange dominating the grandstands at some of the world’s racetracks, from the Red Bull Ring to Zandvoort via Spa, is actually in support of McLaren, not Max Verstappen.
And for once it really did feel that way, too, as the spectators situated at Zandvoort’s arena section rose to applaud Norris as he blasted out of the chicane on his final lap.
Having witnessed three Max masterclasses in as many years since the Dutch Grand Prix returned to the calendar in 2021, this crowd knows a great drive when it sees one.
Since taking his maiden victory in Miami in early May, Norris and McLaren have seen a number of opportunities to add to their tally slip away in F1 2024.
Yet at his best – Miami, here and when stealing pole position from Verstappen in the closing seconds of Q3 back in Barcelona – there have been a few moments this year when Norris has resembled the Max of 2021, a talent blossoming before the world’s eyes and the only driver remotely capable of living with, and occasionally humbling, the dominant World Champion of modern times.
F1 2024 head to heads: How team-mates compare after the Dutch Grand Prix
👉 F1 2024: Head-to-head qualifying record between team-mates
👉 F1 2024: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates
For Norris, this victory in the upgraded McLaren marked the end of brat summer.
In his eagerness to build on Miami, Norris had flirted with the dark side in the rounds leading up to the summer break, racing Verstappen with an uncharacteristic aggression (recklessness?) until the inevitable collision in Austria, before daring to turn on his own team during that tense final stint in Hungary weeks later.
It was as though, in order to mark himself as an elite driver, Norris had convinced himself that he had to make a statement of some description to prove to everyone – perhaps most of all to himself – that he too possesses a ruthless side and has it in him to do what the winners do.
With this weekend’s update cementing the McLaren MCL38’s status as the car to beat, however, that determination to try and convince people was no longer there. Didn’t need to be.
Lando Norris could just go out and be Lando Norris, natural and relaxed and dazzling in converting pole into victory for the first time in his career.
There was once a time, and not too long ago, when losing the lead to Verstappen off the line would have pretty much signalled the end of Norris’s afternoon, such was his lack of resilience in the first sign of adversity.
This time? Reset. Catch him. Pass him. Disappear.
That’s what the inherent confidence that comes with having the fastest car can do and it was the simplicity and calm execution of this win, after so many agonising misses, that really stood out here.
There’s something about Lando. Always has been. We knew he was good, but how good? And how much better still could he become?
With the sheer performance of the car creating a comfort zone at Zandvoort, this weekend offered the first indication of the true extent of his ultimate potential, provided the first real evidence that he is capable of reaching a Verstappen-esque level of performance in the right machinery.
This column argued after the Belgian Grand Prix that the rest of F1 2024 is important for McLaren’s 2025 title hopes, the final 10 races providing an opportunity for them to get fluent in the language of winning – and develop a sharpness and confidence – ahead of a more complete Championship challenge next year.
It applies as much to the drivers as the team itself, for this is the opportune moment for Norris to eradicate once and for all his remaining imperfections – including those pesky starts – and build some serious momentum so he can enter F1 2025 with belief of taking Verstappen down.
This was a near-faultless start to the most critical phase of Norris’s career to date.
Now to do it again at Monza and start turning this winning feeling, a novelty up to now, into a habit.
Red Bull are more reliant than ever on Max Verstappen
It was Martin Johnson, the great cricket correspondent, who came up with probably the most famous line in the history of sportswriting.
Assessing the England squad’s chances ahead of the 1986/87 Ashes Series in Australia, Johnson wrote: “There are only three things wrong with this England team: they can’t bat, they can’t bowl and they can’t field.”
That quote came to mind on Friday at Zandvoort as Max Verstappen reflected on his first day of running after the summer break and Red Bull’s productive mid-season review of the RB20 car.
“A bit too slow on the short run, a bit too slow on the long run,” he said.
Right. And any positives, Max?
“At the moment, there’s no clear answer of how to improve that.”
What foundation was there to build on over the rest of the weekend? It was a damning reflection of where Red Bull stand currently, the team having lost the poise – the gift at excelling in all areas – that made them so impenetrable until the F1 2024 season suddenly took a strange turn.
The RB20 has few redeeming features at this stage of the season and left Verstappen on the receiving end of a 22.8-second deficit to Norris at the chequered flag, Max at his home race subjected to the kind of crushing beating he has so often dished out – and with such ease – over recent years.
This, of course, was the second appearance of the super-high downforce iteration of the RB20 initially introduced in Hungary, stripped of the cannons on the engine cover and specifically designed to excel at such tight and twisty circuits as Zandvoort.
In truth, however, this second glance of the RB20B was no more convincing – maybe even less so – than the first in Budapest, raising yet more doubts over the post-Adrian Newey technical team led by Pierre Waché.
The nature of the Dutch Grand Prix weekend did not favour Red Bull, the windy conditions and the heavily interrupted Friday and Saturday morning practice sessions – of which the team now need every last minute to heave the car into a workable setup window – counting against them.
In the circ*mstances, in this car, second place on the grid and the podium was an overachievement by Verstappen. And the fact he even led the race at all amounted to a minor miracle.
As is often the case in these scenarios, Verstappen himself is quite possibly performing to a higher level now, in extracting the maximum and a little bit more from a reluctant car, than he was even when dominating.
Despite the best efforts of the more partisan elements of the British media to convince us that the F1 2024 title fight is still wide open, Verstappen – still a very comfortable 70 points ahead of Norris – should have enough to clinch a fourth title over the remaining nine races.
It is almost inconceivable that team and driver – this team and this driver – won’t find something to force through at least another victory or two, if only through sheer force of will and racing nous in the style of Canada and Spain.
Yet it is clear that Verstappen’s team are more reliant on him than ever this year to finish the job.
It’s all down to Max to drag Red Bull across the line in 2024.
And then what?
What are Red Bull going to do for F1 2025?
Few questioned it at the time, simply because Red Bull are Red Bull and the decisions they take often prove correct, but it always felt curious that the reigning World Champions decided to produce a new car concept for F1 2024.
Why? Just take a look at the recent history of Formula 1.
When Mercedes emerged as the sport’s leading force at the beginning of the V6-hybrid era in 2014, for instance, their most dominant season of that three-year rules cycle statistically was the last one in 2016.
And when the regulations were once again reset the following season, it took four years – and the impeccable W11 of 2020 – for the team to finally hit perfection.
After producing the most dominant season in history in 2023, winning 21 of a possible 22 races as Verstappen eased to a third consecutive title, Red Bull may have thought that the RB19 was at the upper limit of what was possible with that particular design under these rules.
Yet with only two full seasons of the ground-effect era completed at the end of last year, there was almost certainly still more juice to be squeezed from the original car concept in 2024.
Have Red Bull been guilty of trying to fix something that wasn’t anywhere near broken in the first place?
Waché recently alluded to this in an exclusive interview with PlanetF1.com, in which he conceded the team pushed the boundaries “maybe too much” with this year’s RB20.
Red Bull’s decline since the start of F1 2024 has been well documented, yet the team seemed to arrive at the Dutch Grand Prix with renewed confidence as Sergio Perez revealed they had found “a lot of stuff” in an evaluation of the car over the summer break.
A deficit of 0.356 seconds to Norris in qualifying and more than 20 seconds in the race at Zandvoort, where Verstappen had been unbeaten since 2021 in the latest demonstration of how dramatically Red Bull’s landscape has altered, strongly suggested otherwise.
With McLaren introducing their biggest upgrade since the transformational Miami package at Zandvoort, Andrea Stella and Co. have consolidated their position as the team with the fastest car.
And so the million-dollar question now ahead of F1 2025, surely, is whether Red Bull will stick or twist.
Waché told PlanetF1.com at Spa that the plan “at the moment” is to develop the RB20 concept, before teasing that next year’s RB21 “will be different than this year, for sure.”
It is shaping up to be the most pivotal F1 design dilemma since the dying days of the Mercedes zero-pod concept.
And if there is anything to be learned from Mercedes’ trials and tribulations across 2022/23, it is that when a group of engineers elect to follow a certain design they will commit everything to making it work – no matter how divisive it may be behind the scenes or what the on-track evidence might suggest.
Admitting defeat, following the path of least resistance and losing face in the process, is considered the very last resort.
So what will it be for Red Bull next year? Will they learn from Mercedes’ mistakes or risk falling into the same trap?
It could be the difference between Verstappen making it five in a row in F1 2025 or being powerless to prevent someone else running away with his title.
The James Vowles vision clashes with the cold, hard reality at Williams
So what convinced Carlos Sainz to join Williams for F1 2025? What was the clincher?
As team principal James Vowles has now said numerous times since the deal was announced 24 hours after the Belgian Grand Prix, it was the consistency of the message.
The same vision Vowles had sold to Sainz when the contract was finally signed in late July was the exact message he had transmitted in their first encounter at last year’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, in a world in which Lewis Hamilton was all set to finish his career at Mercedes and a Ferrari extension for Sainz had the feel of a formality.
Vowles’ clarity, honesty and transparency, combined with the promise that things would get better, counted for something – everything, actually – against Sainz’s lingering doubts over the likes of Audi.
Listen to Vowles, F1’s answer to Gareth Southgate, speak for any length of time and you cannot fail to be impressed by him.
It is easy to appreciate why Sainz was seduced by him and why others – drivers, engineers and other staff, including the 26 hires made from rival teams this summer – would follow him to the end of the earth too.
So convincing a speaker is Vowles, in fact, such a positive picture he can paint, that he can even make you forget that Williams currently sit ninth out of 10 teams in the Constructors’ Championship, having scored just four points all season.
Vowles is believable when he outlines his masterplan to return Williams to wins and World Championships in the coming years, yet rubbing harshly against that vision is the cold, hard reality of the team’s current situation.
After the spare chassis saga in Australia, another moment that made you want to look away came at Zandvoort as Alex Albon was disqualified from qualifying due to his new floor – introduced as part of the team’s “first proper upgrade” of the season, which has finally arrived 15 races in – being too wide.
And these two low points from the team preparing to welcome one of the most prominent drivers of the modern era four months from now…
Far from adding extra pressure to the workforce, Vowles is convinced that a driver lineup of the quality of Sainz/Albon will have a positive impact on Williams from F1 2025, leaving the team with no option but to bring themselves up to standard in certain areas and cutting out embarrassing slip ups of this nature.
Yet equally the signing of a driver of Sainz’s calibre could so easily become a burden reminiscent of Renault’s signing of Daniel Ricciardo from Red Bull.
When Ricciardo arrived at Enstone in 2019, it wasn’t long before people started suggesting that the funds Renault were committing towards his salary – estimated at the time to be around $25million – would have been better spent building a faster car.
Indeed, it was instructive when Flavio Briatore remarked recently that Alpine’s choice of driver for F1 2025 “makes no difference” until the team themselves are better placed to match their ambition.
Vowles talks a good talk, yet when it comes to Williams actually walking the walk?
Sainz may have been won over, but the jury is still out.
Williams cannot persevere with Logan Sargeant for a second longer
That is for then, this is for now.
Since being appointed only the third team principal in Williams’ history at the start of last year, Vowles has prided himself on taking tough decisions and standing by them.
Short-term measures? They’re for fools and chancers. Only decisions in the long-term interests of Williams will do.
His call to withdraw Logan Sargeant from the Australian Grand Prix earlier this season split opinion, and ultimately backfired after Albon failed to score points in his team-mate’s car, yet Vowles was brave enough to take it and then stand firmly by it.
Right or wrong? That was for others to decide, but Vowles was definite and decisive in his leadership, taking what he saw as the best decision for the team and accepting the blowback.
And after Albon’s disqualification from qualifying at Zandvoort, Williams took the unusual step on race morning of distributing a short clip of Vowles explaining what went wrong and how he intends to put it right, the latest sign of his commitment to fronting up.
Another big decision now looms after Sargeant’s season slumped to a new low this weekend, when a violent crash in final practice – sparked, it seemed, by Sarge simply forgetting where the exit kerb at Turn 3 ended – ruled him out of qualifying.
Albon’s Saturday at Zandvoort may have ended on a sour note, yet his eighth place in qualifying (illegal floor notwithstanding) hinted at signs of promise in the revised car.
If Vowles was unprepared to waste a point-scoring opportunity back in Melbourne, he cannot afford to do so now by allocating the second upgraded car to a driver who has barely troubled the top 10 since making his debut last year.
Opportunity knocks here, with Williams sitting just nine points adrift of Alpine following the Dutch Grand Prix.
And with Kevin Magnussen a lost cause these days, could having two drivers capable of contributing semi-consistent points help Williams hunt down Haas – currently 23 points ahead – and potentially see them salvage another seventh place from Vowles’ turbulent second season in charge?
Having left open the possibility of dropping Sargeant before the summer break, not long after that FP3 crash rumours began to surface that Vowles’ patience has finally expired.
Then, after the race on Sunday, both Toto Wolff and Christian Horner told media including PlanetF1.com that they would gladly loan their reserve drivers (Mick Schumacher and Liam Lawson) to Williams for the remainder of the season.
If Vowles is as committed as he says to building a prosperous future for Williams – position changes in the Constructors’ Championship are far more significant to teams at the foot of the standings than the top – these are offers he cannot possibly turn down.
Watch this space.
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