Lando Norris reveals key to Dutch Grand Prix victory

Lando Norris has opened up on the mid-weekend changes that he and McLaren worked on to propel him to the win in the Dutch GP.

Norris made it consecutive victories on Formula 1’s return from the summer break as he repeated his success in last month’s Hungarian GP to claim a second win at Zandvoort.

Lando Norris reacts to Dutch GP win

But it was not plain sailing as, like in 2024, Norris lost the lead in the opening stages, dropping behind Kimi Antonelli when Max Verstappen’s heavy crash on the first lap necessitated a stoppage that preceded a second standing start once the race resumed.

“We saw already yesterday that from pole the grip was less than on P2,” Norris told Planet F1 and accredited media. “That was evident again today.

“I don’t know why. I need to go see. I’ve not seen what happened with my start, but of course I’ve got to review it with my team and understand what went wrong.

“But even on the first start, Oscar [Piastri], I think, started on the inside on a more wet track, but he could attack the launch more than I could from pole when I was more conservative with my launch, and I had more wheelspin than him.

“So, it really made no sense why I had such little grip.

“And in some ways we were expecting it, hence we started on soft compared to a different tyre. But I don’t want to just blame myself or the team at the minute.

“Certainly, a large part of it was we didn’t understand why I had such little grip compared to the right side of the grid. So sometimes it’s just a bit unfortunate.

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“But like I said, I’ve not seen everything, so I need to go and speak with the team. But I’m confident in my first laps. My starts have been very strong.”

However, with six laps newer tyres at his disposal, Norris reeled in Antonelli to be in a position to swoop around the outside of the Mercedes through Turn 1 on Lap 54.

“I know when the car gives me what I want, on top of that when I’m driving at the level I am now, I can win races,” he expressed. “And that’s exactly what I went from the first stint, I didn’t have what I wanted from the car.

“We put on the hard tyres, we were a bit more aggressive with how we wanted to approach the stint; we turned things around, and I had that feeling that I wanted.

“And I went from just not feeling like I was going to win a race to, ‘At least we can force him (Antonelli) to make mistakes.’ He started to make a lot more mistakes when I was behind him.

“We forced Mercedes to do something with strategy. This opened up our availability to push, to extend.

“So, it’s just when I get what I need from a car, when I have the front I want, when I’ve got the confidence with the rear on entries, just when I get what I need to be able to know and predict every single corner, I’m going to win a race.

“But if I don’t have that, even like the first stint, then there’s not much I can do.”

Having struggled to maintain his pace through the shorter-length sprint race earlier in the weekend, Norris has admitted the win would not have been attainable without the intensive analysis he underwent with his engineers on Saturday night.

“I was pretty disappointed yesterday,” he conceded. “It kind of took a little bit of the fire out of me, seeing how much we struggled in the sprint.

“I know it’s just a sprint, but every point matters and we just really didn’t have the pace. I didn’t have that something that gave me life inside the car.

“Last night we worked very, very hard. I spent a lot of time with my engineers to kind of understand what we could do better today, how to push more, save the tyres more, how to do everything in a better way than I’ve done and better than everyone else. And I certainly believe I did that today.

“So apart from the start, it was a little bit of a mix of races because the beginning in the first stint was pretty bad and kind of reminded me of yesterday. But we put the hard tyres on and things came alive and the race really started to come back to me.”

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