Norris inflicts Verstappen’s first defeat at home to kick-start his title chase · RaceFans

When it comes to deciding the winners of the world drivers’ and constructors’ championships for 2024, all 24 rounds in F1’s longest-ever season will be counted. But the final ten rounds that will decide who emerges victorious.

Even before teams packed their bags for the summer break, the paradigm of the 2024 season had already shifted dramatically from the start of the year.

After seven wins from the opening ten rounds, Red Bull and Max Verstappen were finally caught by their rivals. Despite Verstappen’s continued efforts behind the wheel, Red Bull failed to achieve a victory for four successive rounds for only the first time since 2020. For the first time in the ground effect era, a rival team – McLaren – overtook them as the clear fastest package on the grid.

The season at the summer break was no longer the one it had been just months earlier. The 2024 championship had evolved into a ten round play-off for both titles – just with a healthy head start for both Verstappen and his team.

If McLaren and Lando Norris – the closest of the team’s drivers to the world champions – were to have any chance of turning a possible but improbable opportunity to chase down the dominant force in Formula 1 over the final part of the year, then the Dutch Grand Prix was simply a must-win race for them. Beating Verstappen at his home race, one that he has reigned supreme at since the sport first returned to Zandvoort – would be the ultimate statement of intent.

So when Norris bumped Verstappen off his customary pole position grid slot at Zandvoort by over three tenths of a second, it was clear: Red Bull had not been able to patch up their vulnerabilities over the summer. Norris’ next job was a crucial one: Beat Verstappen to the first corner. Pull that off and catching him may prove a challenge beyond even Verstappen’s powers.

But as much as Formula 1 is about the might of the machinery, it is ultimately the human element that determines the outcome. Norris was 0-for-5 for keeping the lead when starting from pole position across grands prix and sprint races in his F1 career – as he was relentlessly reminded over Saturday evening.

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At just under 300 metres, Zandvoort presented one of the shortest runs from pole to the first corner on the calendar. This was Norris’ chance to prove the stats didn’t matter. That this wasn’t something he was in his head about. That he truly possesses the skillset required to take on Verstappen in a title challenge.

As tempting as it could have been for McLaren to arm their pole-sitting car with soft tyres to give him the best chance of reaching Tarzan first, they opted to play the long game and fit mediums – the sensible choice, as Verstappen and the eight drivers directly behind them did the same.

When the lights went out, so too did Norris’s hopes of holding the lead from pole for the first time. As if powered by the road of more than 100,000 Dutch fans, Verstappen sprang out of his grid slot to seize the lead before he had to think of hitting the brakes for the first corner. McLaren received a double dose of disappointment when George Russell demoted Oscar Piastri from third to fourth, while Charles Leclerc picked up fifth from Sergio Perez.

At the end of the opening lap, which all 20 drivers navigated without incident, Verstappen was informed that Norris was outside of the second he needed to use his DRS. It was the best possible start to the race Verstappen could have asked for his 200th grand prix, but despite losing the lead, Norris was not concerned.

“I was actually just surprisingly calm,” he explained after the race. “Maybe because I’m a bit used to going backwards at the start. I’m very prepared for those kind of scenarios. I was very calm and just [thought] ‘okay, well, what can I do now?’ And that was just to look ahead, start saving tyres, see what I had pace-wise.”

The conventional wisdom from the pattern of the season so far is that the best time to attack to gain position on track is immediately at the start of a stint, before a rival has brought their tyres into the ideal operating window. But Norris was content with biding his time. Race engineer Will Joseph floated the idea of switching to “Plan B” which could offer him a chance of taking the fight to Red Bull in the pits, but Norris was hardly having trouble staying in Verstappen’s mirrors.

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The ninth lap was the furthest that Verstappen got from the McLaren – just 1.55 seconds. As the Red Bull’s mediums passed their prime, Norris edged a little nearer, lap by lap. On lap 16, Norris decided he’d had enough of looking at Verstappen’s rear wing and picked up the pace, eating six tenths into his lead and forcing Verstappen to take a defensive line into Tarzan at the start of the next lap.

Verstappen now looked under genuine threat. The superior pace that McLaren had shown at the Hungaroring – the last high-downforce circuit – appeared to have returned. And with McLaren’s new rear wing to his advantage, Norris was primed to attack.

The DRS zone along the pit straight was always going to present the best opportunity to pass. Verstappen had little to defend against Norris’ 15kph speed boost and the McLaren dived down the inside of Tarzan and into the lead. Within a handful of laps, Norris’ lead over the Red Bull was already greater than Verstappen’s had even been over him.

“As soon as I got ahead, it was quite straightforward,” Norris admitted. “I could push. I had good confidence to push the whole race, save the tyres a little bit, but just get in a good rhythm and go from there.”

While one McLaren was now out in front, the other, Piastri, was facing pressure from Leclerc for fourth place. Piastri did not seem as comfortable as his team mate, having been unable to reclaim third from Russell after losing it at the start, and was now under threat from the Ferrari.

On lap 24, Leclerc became the first of the leaders to pit, fitting the hard tyres that Ferrari intended him to get to the end of the race with. Mercedes pitted Russell from third, leading to McLaren opting to keep Piastri out for longer. But a fast out-lap for Leclerc and a below-average stop for Russell meant that the Ferrari beat the Mercedes out of the pit lane to move up one position with the promise of more.

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Verstappen made his own switch to hards at the end of lap 27, with McLaren immediately covering him by bringing the leader in on the next lap. But such was Norris’s superior pace after passing the Red Bull, he was able to rejoin more than five seconds clear of his rival.

Piastri now assumed the lead, but it was already clear that he had little chance of keeping ahead of Leclerc once he made his own stop, which eventually came at the end of lap 33. Predictably, he rejoined behind both Leclerc and Russell in fifth, handing the lead back to his team mate in the process. But it did not take long for Piastri to reel in Russell ahead of him, and although the Mercedes made him work for it by forcing him to take the outside line through Tarzan, the McLaren swept by and into fourth place to begin his pursuit of Leclerc.

By now, Norris had more than doubled his lead over Verstappen to more than ten seconds. Red Bull clearly lacked an answer for the race pace of the McLaren and the prospects of a fourth consecutive home grand prix victory were dwindling by the lap with Verstappen now increasingly battling the balance of his car.

“I was just doing my own race, looking after the tyres, I tried to do the best I could,” Verstappen later said. “At one point, nothing was turning or responding anymore. So once he [Norris] passed, I just focused on doing my race, tried to bring it to the end in second.”

Back in the pack, Lewis Hamilton had moved up to eighth place having started down in 14th following a disappointing qualifying session and a penalty. Having started on soft tyres then switched to hards, Mercedes switched him back to softs for the final stint, after which Hamilton set the fastest lap of the race. With Mercedes concerned about the state of team mate Russell’s tyres ahead, they summoned him in from fifth place to fit softs, hoping that he would quickly close on Perez and Sainz, who he had been running in front of.

After passing Russell, Piastri closed up to third-placed Leclerc. But despite getting within DRS range for multiple laps, the McLaren driver appeared unable to emulate his team mate from earlier in the race and make the move happen. Instead, Leclerc held his nerve and broke beyond a second of the McLaren, despite being on much older tyres than Piastri behind him.

“When he got closer, I started to push a bit more and gained five tenths,” Leclerc explained after the race.

“I think with the dirty air, he probably lost three or four tenths. He managed to stay behind and to put me quite under pressure for two, three laps, but then couldn’t stay there because of the overheating.” He praised Ferrari for their “really good strategy” having passed Piastri by pitting before him.

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Leclerc and Piastri were the two closest cars in the top ten throughout the final 20 laps of the race. Out front, Norris was simply winding down the laps in complete control of proceedings, pulling ever further away from Verstappen. Russell’s bid to catch Perez was looking increasingly likely to fail, as he was unable to take the required time out of the second Red Bull lap by lap to remain on schedule to catch it before the end of the race.

The first grand prix back after three weekends without any F1 offered little in the way of action at the front, with no changes of position in the top eight over the final 18 laps of the race. But as Norris continued to waltz away from Verstappen, it was hard not to wonder whether this might be the shape of things to come over the final nine weekends of the season.

As the last lap loomed, Hamilton sat on the bonus point for the fastest lap of the race. Norris wanted to take it from him. With his lead almost north of 20 seconds, Norris began to reduce deployment of his ERS to charge his battery as much as possible. Entering the final lap, Norris unleashed all of those extra megajoules and wrung everything he could out of his more than 40-lap-old hard tyres for the final 4.2 kilometres of the Dutch Grand Prix.

Despite having only tasted the winner’s champagne once before in his F1 career, Norris had looked utterly at ease out front, with only his poor start giving him any cause for concern all afternoon. He crossed the line not just to become the 80th F1 driver in history to win multiple grands prix, but to strike the first blow for McLaren in this ten-round shootout for the titles. Taking the fastest lap with his final tour, his 26 points also gained him eight points on Verstappen in the drivers’ standings.

“A win is always satisfying, so very good,” said Norris. “Obviously it didn’t start in the most optimistic way, but the pace was unbelievable from the beginning and I could go with Max quite happily at the start. I just didn’t expect our pace to be probably as good as what it was today, which is a good thing.”

More than 22 seconds passed before Verstappen took the chequered flag to the cheers of his thousands of loyal fans, disappointed his monopoly over Zandvoort wins was now over, but appreciative that it had not been through a lack of effort on their hero’s part.

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“It just seems like we are too slow, but also quite bad on deg at the moment,” came his assessment. “That’s a bit weird because I think the last few years normally we’ve been quite good on that. So something has been going wrong lately with the car that we need to understand and we need to, of course, quickly try to improve.”

After countless laps fighting to keep out of reach of Piastri, Leclerc finished in third to secure a brilliant and unexpected podium for Ferrari, beating a McLaren, his team mate, a Red Bull and the two Mercedes home in the process.

“It’s a great result. I’m really happy to be standing on the podium and I think it’s a really good surprise,” Leclerc admitted. “I did not expect to keep that third place until the end, but we did a really good job as a team. I don’t think there was anything more we could have done today.”

Piastri finished behind the Ferrari in fourth with plenty of analysis to do to work out how he had seemed so much slower than his team mate when it had mattered most. Sainz took a respectable fifth ahead of Perez in sixth and two disappointed Mercedes of Russell and Hamilton behind them. The final two points positions were claimed by Pierre Gasly – in the first race for Alpine’s new team principal Oliver Oakes – with Fernando Alonso in tenth. For the fourth time in 2024 all 20 drivers were classified.

In their quest to take the battle to Red Bull over the final races, McLaren have taken a successful first step. And having done so in Verstappen country, they now know they could potentially beat him anywhere over the last nine rounds if they continue on this trajectory.

Overcoming their points deficits to Red Bull in both championships would be an unprecedented turnaround, but as Norris proved on the track in Zandvoort, it’s not about how you start, but how you finish.