Lando Norris cruised to his second victory in Formula One by a stunning 23 seconds ahead of triple world champion Max Verstappen. The British driver had again been slow to start from his pole position and was passed by Verstappen quickly into one of the shortest run downs to a turn one amongst the current F1 venues.

Yet Norris remained patient claiming he expected Max to pull away, but he didn’t. Then on lap 18 the McLaren sailed by the Red Bull down the main straight and was ahead on the exit of turn one.

Coming into his home race weekend, Verstappen had failed to win any of the previous four Grand Prix, yet despite this run of poor results Norris failed to capitalise and with his DNF in Austria it meant he scored seven points less than the world champion.

 

 

 

McLaren controversial decision

Of course there was the controversial decision made by McLaren in Hungary which saw Lando forced to conceded the lead of the race to his team mate Oscar Piastri. Norris had enjoyed an advantageous pit stop decision which saw him emerge ahead of Piastri after the last round of pit stops.

The gap would be 63 had the team not taken the decision they did in Hungary and with just nine races remaining it could yet prove to be the difference between winning and losing the drivers’ championship for the young British driver.

Norris is now 46 points clear of his team mate and it would be expected from here on in McLaren would be supporting his bid to chase down Max Verstappen. Yet even after such a dominant performance in Zandvoort, team boss Andreas Stella refused to admit the McLaren would now make Norris’ title bid their goal.

“We already have conversations around team orders from race one because you always want to enter a race having clarity as to how we will manage internal competition,” Stella said. “This happens all season, then you have to take this conversation in the context of what the drivers’ classification is.

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Stella reiterates ‘no number one driver’

“We have nine races ahead of us and if we create a No 1 driver what do we do? All the favours to one driver? This is not a healthy way of running a team. For every race we will analyse the situations and in the 50-50 situations, in this case if Lando needs a bit of extra support, we are going to give it to him. But the team includes Oscar, the team should not do things that are not reasonable to Oscar. We are in this together.”

This is a bold statement from a team who has been nowhere near a title race since 2010 where the team came in just 44 points behind Red Bull Racing. It further may prove to have been naive but should have been expected given McLaren have not been required to maximise every detail needed to win F1 titles for almost fifteen years.

Lando Norris was asked in the media pen following his victory whether he was now thinking about a possible drivers’ world championship. He replied with some ire, “I’ve been fighting for the championship since the first race of the year. There’s no sudden decision now,” said Norris.

The British driver noted he remains “70 points behind Max. So it’s pretty stupid to think of anything at the minute.” He added the focus was on “one race at a time” and that it was pointless trying to work out the permutations possible. 

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Lando warns a journalist

Norris issued a veiled warning to journalists going forward, not to continue with this line of questioning. “I don’t care about it at the minute. I’m just… yeah, focused on one race at a time, so it’s not a question that I need to get asked every single weekend.”

McLaren arrived in Zandvoort with a raft of upgrades for the car only to be greeted by the worst conditions possible for evaluating new parts. Rain wiped out of most of FP1 and while FP2 was relatively dry, the high winds menthe teams abandoned any aero rake data collecting and just set about understanding the tyre life.

Even without the upgrades Lando believes he would have won in the Netherlands. “I still feel like we would have won without the upgrades this weekend,” he said. “The upgrades didn’t make us suddenly a lot quicker here.

“The upgrades we’ve been putting on the car, they helped us every time. It’s not like we put it on and questioned it. We put it on and it just did everything we wanted it to do and needed it to do, and what it was meant to do.”

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McLaren upgrades work instantly 

Clearly McLaren are in a better place than Red Bull who according to Dutch media outlet De Telegraaf, binned many of their in season upgrades and ran Max’s RB20 with an early season specification of the floor.

This was the first proper upgrade for McLaren since Miami where Norris claimed his maiden F1 victory. This he believes means they lost some of their competitive advantage back then as others have been updating their cars more regularly.

But as Lando explains the team prefers to ensure the upgrades will work before fitting them. “This was our first time that we really put something on the car to drive us a step forward. It definitely did that.”

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Monza, a different challenge

As to the astonishing winning margin of almost 23 seconds, Norris believes some of this is due to Red Bull going backwards rather than being all McLaren performance gains.“I think that was probably more the factor that the Red Bull struggled a bit more than we were expecting. We just keep our heads down,” he said.

Lando believes no one team is guaranteed to win each weekend and next time up in Monza is no different: “Anyone could be on top,” he suggested. “Ferrari, Mercedes, Red Bull, us. Ferrari was quite quick. We probably didn’t expect them to be as good as they were. Maybe Red Bull struggled a bit more.”

Even if Max Verstappen was sand bagging once he realised he couldn’t win, as Martin Brundle suggested, Red Bull will struggle to close such a large time differential in less than a week until Monza and McLaren should be hot favourites at the home of the Scuderia.

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Red Bull SHOCKING findings in RB20’s development direction

Red Bull are known for impressive in season development of their Formula One cars. Back in 2009 Brawn stole a march on the field with their innovative double diffuser and this powered Jenson Button to win six of the first seven races of the year.

Yet Red Bull’s in season development saw them half the deficit to Brawn over the second half of the year, finishing just 19.5 points behind the new world champions. During their all dominant 2023 season, Red Bull’s advantage meant they could thoroughly evaluate their upgrades before fitting them to the RB19.

This year the world champions do not have this luxury and despite Max Verstappen winning seven of the first nine Grand Prix, they are just 42 points ahead of McLaren who have been closing them down… READ MORE