Norris vanquishes Verstappen in Zandvoort: can McLaren stay top?

These sort of tracks – Qatar is another – is where you will see peak McLaren.

“It’s a track that seems to be just very suitable for our car, like Hungary was,” admitted Andrea Stella. “It seems to be very track dependent at the moment. But this was definitely beyond expectations in terms of qualifying and race performance. And to some extent even the tyre degradation was very good to the point that Lando scored the fastest lap of the race at the last lap.”

This weekend the car got its second big upgrade of the year, adding a more efficient high-downforce rear wing to its armoury, one which sees it finally match the Red Bull’s DRS gain.

Red Bull’s development

There has been some ambiguity in the RB20’s development. At least some of the upgrades do not seem to always perform. Verstappen has long been complaining about a car which has too much understeer at low speeds but which becomes unstable at higher speeds.

“The whole weekend has been the same,” he said after the race.

“I had pretty much the same balance from FP1 all the way to the race, the limitations are the same. It’s just very hard to solve at the moment. It just seems like we are too slow, but also quite bad on [tyre] deg at the moment. 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.”

The team has been looking askance at the front wing angles McLaren and Mercedes have been able to run since introducing their respective new front wings. Are they somehow achieving enough flex at high loads to begin bleeding off excess load? Red Bull for years led the way in such technology, but maybe no longer does.

Verstappen’s choices

In an effort to at least get a known quantity baseline Verstappen opted to switch to a version of the original spec floor after Friday practice. Sergio Perez – who raced to sixth place ahead of the two Mercedes of Russell and Lewis Hamilton – remained on the later one. Initial post-race analysis by the team suggest the Perez floor was working much more effectively.

After a few laps Verstappen was complaining that the car just wasn’t responding in the slow corners and that his tyres were beginning to suffer as a result.

The slow corner response problem was only made worse by the choice of a maximum downforce Monaco rear wing (Perez was on a lower one). Tyre deg looked set to be very high and the big wing was to protect the rears. Except tyre deg in general was way lower than forecast hence Verstappen was driving a car with slow corner understeer and slow end-of-straight speeds for no compensating tyre deg benefit. So once the new tyre grip wore off, he was caught and passed quite easily by Norris who then pulled away with ease.

Such gambles were hastened of course by McLaren’s speed and balance.

“We ran the cars in different specifications,” confirmed Christian Horner, “and I think that has actually given us quite a lot of valuable info. The drivers’ feedback has been very clear in terms of what they’re feeling from the different set-ups. It hopefully now gives a real direction for the engineering group. I think it was clear that Checo’s race performance and race package was the better of the two. But we’ve got obviously 144 laps of data and a lot across two different compounds of tires now to compare that info. And a clear direction to follow.”

Like that, Norris delivered a devastating victory and Verstappen’s second was pretty good in the compromised circumstances. He wasn’t so far clear of Leclerc’s Ferrari – which had good balance and tyre deg but was 0.9sec off the qualifying pace. Ferrari made all the right calls, undercutting Leclerc past Russell and Piastri – and Leclerc did the rest.

Piastri passed Russell who was then converted to a two-stop as he was about to be passed by the charging Ferrari of Carlos Sainz (who, like Hamilton, had failed to make it into the Q3 part of qualifying). This lost him a place also to Perez and he didn’t have the pace even on his new soft tyres to take those places back. Hamilton, starting a penalised 14th, was always going to two-stop and was right with him and lapping faster despite older tyres. But a 7-8 for Mercedes on the back of a 1-2 just underlined how volatile the competitive order is – behind McLaren.