‘Norris’ new-found dominance alarming Red Bull’

Lando Norris said after winning the Dutch Grand Prix that it was “pretty stupid” to think about winning the world championship – but his dominant victory on championship leader Max Verstappen’s home track certainly has Red Bull worried.

Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko said after the race that Norris’ victory was “alarming” – and made it clear that he was speaking not only about the constructors’ championship, in which it was already very clear that Red Bull were in trouble, but also the drivers’, in which Verstappen still has a huge 70-point lead.

And Verstappen himself, who has now not won since the Spanish Grand Prix in June five races ago, did not disagree.

“This weekend was just a bad weekend in general,” Verstappen said. “So we need to understand that.

“But the last few races already, they haven’t really been fantastic. So that, I think in a sense, was already a bit alarming.

“But we know that we don’t need to panic. We are just trying to improve the situation. And that’s what we are working on. But F1 is very complicated.”

Norris’ victory was the second-most dominant of the year, in terms of the winner’s gap to his closest rival. Only Verstappen’s victory in the opening race of the season in Bahrain, when he was 25 seconds clear of the first non-Red Bull, saw the victor cross the line further ahead than the 22.9 seconds by which Norris headed the Dutchman.

It was the manner of it that was so impressive. Norris and McLaren somehow fluffed the start, not for the first time this year, gifting Verstappen the lead.

But while before – in Spain, in Hungary and in Belgium – this has ruined Norris’ chances of victory, it soon became clear that would not be the case in Zandvoort.

Norris clung to Verstappen like a limpet and then overtook him with imperious ease before the first pit stops, cruising off into the middle distance thereafter. To rub salt into his rivals’ wounds, he then set the fastest lap on the final lap of the race, securing an extra point.

That made the amount he clawed back on Verstappen eight points, not seven.

Significantly, both in figurative and literal terms, that was slightly over the 7.8 points per race Norris needed on average to claw back on Verstappen over the remaining 10 races to win the title before arriving in the Netherlands.

Norris, though, was not about to get carried away.

“I mean, I’ve been fighting for the championship since the first race of the year,” he said. “There’s no sudden decision of, now I need to do better.

“I’ve been working hard the whole year and I’m still 70 points behind Max. So it’s pretty stupid to think of anything at the minute.

“I just take one race at a time and just keep doing what I’m doing now because there’s no point to think ahead and think of the rest. I don’t care about it at the minute. So it’s not a question that I need to get asked every single weekend.”

It was hard, though, not to see the potential importance of this victory. McLaren, Norris admitted, had already had the fastest car on average since the Miami Grand Prix back in May, when he took his maiden victory, following an upgrade that transformed the car from the third fastest into a regular competitor with Red Bull.

Since then, though, Norris had not managed to secure another win – and he admitted after his win on Sunday that “we probably should have won two, three more races as a team, but we didn’t”.

The pressure to convert that form into wins was growing, and McLaren arrived at Zandvoort after the summer break with their first performance upgrade since Miami.

They played it down, to a degree, saying it was not as big as the Miami one. About 30% of that size, it seemed. But it still seemed to make a marked difference.

Norris took pole by the stunning margin of 0.356 seconds on the second-shortest track of the year.

In percentage terms, it was the largest margin for a pole-winning driver since Verstappen’s in the fourth race of the season in China. And that was at a time when Red Bull appeared to have picked up from where they left off in 2023 and looked set for another dominant season.

And then came the race.

“We worked hard over the summer break to just try and take a step back and reset and go again,” Norris said. “So yes, we’ve had a great car. This was our first time we bought some good upgrades to the car since Miami. They worked very well then. They’ve worked once again now.

“But it’s still a long way to go. So we still have to keep working hard because this is just Zandvoort. Monza (this coming weekend) is a completely different circuit. So we’ll keep our heads down and keep chipping away.”

The contrast with Red Bull was marked. In contrast with McLaren, they have not had such great success with the reliability of upgrades.

Back in Canada in June, Mercedes technical director James Allison said it looked to him as if an upgrade Red Bull had introduced in Imola in May had actually been a downgrade. Red Bull team boss Christian Horner rejected that claim.

And yet in Zandvoort, Verstappen was using a version of the first floor design used this year, not any of the subsequent changes. And team-mate Sergio Perez a later version.

It underlined the impression that Red Bull are struggling to improve their car this year.

Verstappen underlined it further. After the race, he talked about some “balance issues” with the car.

“It wasn’t there in the first few races,” he said. “But yeah, something in the car has made it more difficult to drive. And it’s very hard to pinpoint where that is coming from at the moment.

“That is then hurting, of course, our one-lap performance, but also our long run.”

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella emphasised that Zandvoort was a circuit where he expected his team’s car to shine.

He said the performance team to team “seems to be very track-dependent”.

“If we go to tracks which belong to this kind of family of tracks, then we can be confident we will perform strongly, like high downforce, long corners,” Stella said.

“If we go to tracks that have very high-speed corners like Silverstone, then we know Red Bull are very strong in this kind of layout.

“And still I think if we go back to Austria they would be faster because in Austria they pulled off a 0.4secs advantage in qualifying.

“But I think thanks to the upgrades now we would be more competitive even where Red Bull were faster than us potentially.”

McLaren still have frailties, too. Losing the start did not cost Norris this time; his pace was too strong and he was able to make amends. But it did hurt team-mate Oscar Piastri.

Both McLarens made bad starts – and the Australian, who started third, lost out to George Russell’s Mercedes as Norris was passed by Verstappen. Piastri never quite recovered.

Ferrari got Charles Leclerc ahead of him at the pit stops by stopping first. McLaren ran long, giving Piastri a tyre advantage. He swept by Russell no problem and for a while Red Bull were worried that he could catch Verstappen – he had the pace. But he became stuck behind Leclerc and finished fourth.

McLaren know they have a problem with first laps. The problem is, every situation has been different.

Norris, who this time simply got too much wheel spin, said: “We know what’s required to do a perfect start. We’re talking about fine margins here.

“Because we both didn’t get it right, it seems like maybe there was an underlying issue or something wasn’t how it was supposed to be, or we’ve clearly misjudged something more than what others did.

“But Oscar’s one of the best starters on the grid. I’m not as good as him, but I’m there or thereabouts. I’m not a bad starter, but not as good as obviously what we need to be.

“Again, it was a race which almost slipped away off the line, but today was, again, different to every other thing that’s happened. So, kind of like I said before the weekend, we need to find a bit more consistency, but we’ve worked on it and I feel like I’ve done better procedurally, but obviously didn’t turn into the correct thing.”

Overall, though, McLaren are beginning to look formidable. It will take a couple of races to see whether this upgrade has really made a big difference. But if Norris can keep winning, he has a real chance of making life difficult for Verstappen in a season that, in terms of the drivers’, had looked locked for months.

Add in the fact that Piastri could also get in the mix – after all, he did win in Hungary – and that Mercedes, off form in Zandvoort for reasons they admitted they didn’t yet understand, but winners of three of the four races before that, can also beat Verstappen, and that 70-point margin begins to look less formidable.

And in three races’ time, F1 returns to Singapore, where Red Bull struggled badly even last year, when they were putting together the most dominant season in history, and where there is no reason to believe the same thing won’t happen again.

Stella said: “In the constructors’ championship, the game was on even before this event. On the drivers’ championship, we definitely wanted to keep our head and focus on the fact that it was possible.

“We think the car in the current configuration is possibly not enough in terms of the performance required to be the best car at every single event. That’s why we plan to deliver more upgrades before the end of the season.”