Lando Norris collected his second victory of the F1 2024 season in Sunday’s Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort. The British driver beat Max Verstappen in his home race thanks to the McLaren MCL38’s unstoppable pace despite a poor race start from Norris once again. Norris’ weakness was on display after losing P1 after the first corner of the Zandvoort circuit – see also the Spanish GP and the Hungarian GP earlier this season.
Despite having a good reaction time when releasing the clutch, the McLaren driver suffered from wheelspin when engaging the second gear of his Mercedes engine. 👉 Dutch Grand Prix conclusions: Lando Norris breakthrough, Red Bull’s big F1 2025 decision 👉 Dutch GP driver ratings: One stand-out driver outscores Norris, Verstappen and Leclerc Verstappen took advantage of this situation to snatch the race lead from Norris without difficulty before the first braking zone at the Tarzan corner just 200 metres away from the start line. Oscar Piastri also had a difficult start and lost P3 to George Russell.
Despite this bad start, Norris found great pace in the McLaren from lap 10 onwards and in just three more laps he was in Verstappen’s DRS zone after managing to close a maximum gap of +1.7 seconds. Verstappen could not push any harder to get a bigger advantage over Norris in the opening stages of the race.
On lap 18, Norris completed a great overtake on Verstappen on the inside of Turn 1, with the latter reporting to his race engineer a lack of grip .