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 on his medium tyres over the radio. And indeed, Verstappen’s lack of grip was evident. Once Norris was able to run in clean air, the gap between Verstappen and Norris increased to six seconds before the Red Bull driver’s pit-stop on lap 28.
Red Bull was the team with the worst tyre wear on the medium tyre, hence the problems that Verstappen himself reported to the team over the radio. Meanwhile, McLaren and Ferrari were the two teams that managed their tyres better in the first stint. The race was not a very complex strategic game.
The predominant strategy was the one-stopper as we predicted on Friday, starting with a medium tyre and stopping approximately 7-10 laps before the halfway point of the race to fit the hard tyre and go with them until the chequered flag. Verstappen had to stop before Norris to prevent the gap between the two from widening. Red Bull therefore settled for P2 here, allowing McLaren and Norris to cover on the lap after Verstappen’s first and only stop.
And the second stint was not much different from the first. In fact, the pace difference between Verstappen and Norris in both stints was the same. Lando was just over four tenths of a second quicker on average per lap over the 72 laps of the Zandvoort race.
With clean air from the start of the second stint in lap 28, Norris was able to increase the gap lap by lap unchallenged. The hard tyre showed little degradation across the four top teams of the grid. All in all, the McLaren was far superior to Red Bull, with a final gap of +22.
896s between Norris and Verstappen. In fact, Norris had the luxury of setting the fastest lap of the race on the final lap on 44-lap-old hard tyres with a time of 1:13.817.
Despite his mistake at the start, Norris kept his head up and took advantage of the MCL38’s great potential to overtake Verstappen on track. Piastri, meanwhile, had a difficult time with Charles Leclerc throughout the afternoon. And it was already in qualifying that McLaren’s true strength became clear.
The Papaya team was the team that most improved its lap times compared to 2023 out of the four big teams. On the other hand, Red Bull was the team that gained the least of all the teams on the grid. Although it was a great result for Norris and McLaren, the fact that Verstappen was able to finish P2 with the obvious pace problems the Red Bull RB20 had at Zandvoort is actually not good news.
At least not for the fight for the Drivers’ World Championship. Verstappen’s second place was a fine result in the circumstances for the Dutch driver and Red Bull. The Dutch Grand Prix should have been another easy one-two for McLaren, as it was in Hungary.
However, Piastri was completely missing during the race and that doesn’t do any good to Norris in his goal to become World Champion in the F1 2024 season. Read next: Martin Brundle shares Max Verstappen conspiracy theory over huge pace gap to McLaren.
