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This Grand Prix – Dutch

Hello welcome to This Dutch Grand Prix, Max Verstappen is steaming towards his second championship now over a hundred points ahead of Charles Leclerc and Sergio Perez he could win his second title in Japan. Ferrari facing the question of why can’t they get their strategy right, meanwhile Mercedes had another great weekend for their race to fall apart on strategy, so is it over…

Weekend recap

FP1 saw George Russell go almost a quarter of a second faster than teammate Lewis Hamilton, with the Ferrari of Carlos Sainz third. The two Mercedes acted late when it came to their soft runs they went out in the final quarter of the session which lead them to take advantage of the track evolution. Sainz was less than a tenth faster than the McLaren of Lando Norris who went a tenth and a half faster than teammate Daniel Ricciardo.

FP2 saw another one two this time for Ferrari, Charles Leclerc managed to edge out his teammate Sainz by four-thousandths of a second on medium tyres. Red Bull meanwhile looked to struggle but Verstappen didn’t do a lap on the soft tyre. Mercedes meanwhile have made a better start to the weekend, Lewis Hamilton going four hundredths faster than Lando Norris. Norris put his McLaren fourth splitting the Silver Arrows after going just over two-tenths faster than George Russell.

FP3 saw Leclerc continue to lead the times setting an 11.632 going six hundredths of a second faster than Russell while Verstappen was almost a tenth further behind in third. Leclerc continued his good form so far this weekend at Zandvoort, as Verstappen’s early pace vanished after a single lap. Hamilton was also unable to match his team-mate’s pace as he took fifth overall, half a second back from Leclerc and over four-tenths off Russell.

Verstappen continued to improve in qualifying to beat Leclerc to take back-to-back poles. The Dutchman setting a 10.342 going two-hundredths of a second faster than Leclerc and Perez. Verstappen along with Sainz were the only drivers to improve on the last run in Q3, the Spaniard going third eight hundredths behind his teammate Leclerc. Perez’s spin at the end of Q3 prevented both Ferrari and Mercedes from improving at the end of the session

Verstappen took a four-second win following a mess up by Mercedes on strategy. Mercedes had undercut Red Bull giving themselves the lead in the closing stages before a late safety car saw the Dutchman under cut Mercedes going to fresher tyres at the restart he then launched his way passed the Mercedes followed by Leclerc who spilt the Mercedes.

Piastri joins McLaren

On Friday, the contract recognition board ruled that Oscar Piastri will join McLaren after a dispute with Alpine over the Australian’s contract. In a communication issued by the FIA on Friday, it was confirmed the CRB had unanimously decided that Piastri’s agreement with McLaren was his only valid deal for next year after Alpine had intended to field him in a race seat next year.

The CRB said: “The only contract to be recognised is the contact between McLaren and Piastri dated 4 July 2022. Piastri is entitled to drive for McLaren for the 2023 and 2024 seasons.”

The feeling on Friday was how has Alpine managed to lose two drivers in effectively a week, Fernando Alonso sparked this six weeks ago when he left Alpine to join Aston Martin. The French manufacturer has lost both drivers – Alonso was frustrated by their unwillingness to offer a longer-term deal and their concern that he might lose performance, while Piastri did not appreciate not being offered the drive at the team he believed they ought to have provided.

Alpine said they “acknowledged the decision”, adding: “We consider the matter closed on our side and will announce our full 2023 driver line-up in due course.”

Following the CRB ruling, Piasrti revealed how “upsetting” it was that Alpine announced him as its 2023 Formula 1 driver, after he had told the squad he wouldn’t be racing for it. He told F1.con, that he had made the decision “well in advance” of Alonso’s departure and had told the team.

Saying “It was quite upsetting as the announcement was false and it also denied me the opportunity to properly say goodbye to everyone at Enstone. I had been with team for a bit over two and a half years now, and for the rest of the team to find out I was leaving in that manner was very upsetting. I still haven’t had the opportunity to say goodbye and it’s something I want to do to show my gratitude to all the men and women at Enstone.”

Piastri also revealed how awkward it was for him, knowing what he had informed Alpine, that he was told during a sim session that the team was putting the announcement out. The south African said that l Otmar Szafnauer revealed last weekend that Piastri had ‘smiled and said thank you’ at being told of the news.

Explaining that he did explain after that, as he had done before, that he was joining McLaren. It is understood that Piastri had been pushing Alpine hard for a firm contract for some time, but says a reluctance from the team to commit at a time when he a free agent meant that the McLaren option progressed.

Mercedes

Lewis Hamilton says it is “nice to know how” his former teammate Fernando Alonso “feels about me” following their first lap crash in the Belgian Grand Prix. The two-time champion called the seven-time champion “an idiot” who “only knows how to drive and start in first.”

Alonso apologised on Thursday, saying the remarks were made in the heat of the moment, the Spaniard said he regretted the outburst and offered an apology to Hamilton, who he called a “champion” and a “legend of our time”.

Adding “When you say something – and I’m sorry to repeat this – against a British driver, there is a huge media involvement after that. If you say something to a Latin driver, everything’s a little bit more fun. But when you say something to others, it’s a little bit more serious.”

Going into the weekend, George Russell said the team doesn’t “fully understand” why they have “big swings” between qualifying and its stronger race pace. We have written this season on Sunday’s the swings between Friday, and Saturday have been confusing, Asked where the major deficit was coming from, Russell lamented a lack of overall downforce.

Mercedes looked very competitive in Friday’s practice and did challenge for pole, which would have shocked Russell who believes qualifying is the teams “weak point.” The British driver topped FP1 at the Dutch Grand Prix on Friday, before dropping to fifth in FP2 as Ferrari pair Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz locked out the top two spots.

On Friday evening, he said, while the car “is working better, there’s no doubt about it” in the Netherlands, but doesn’t expect to be in the fight for pole position as “we still know qualifying is our weak point”. Russell says that Budapest was “unique” and the team took advantage of the situation, he says that Mercedes will fare better on its long-run pace than over a single lap but warned that it may not be able to utilise it unless the Silver Arrows feature towards the sharp end of the grid.

That optimism continued all the way in Q3 with one of the closest sessions of the seasons, Hamilton had gone fastest in the first sector before Perez brought out the yellow flag, but he doubted he could have challenged Verstappen for pole. Hamilton ended qualifying four-tenths of a second off Max Verstappen’s pole position time, but was forced to abandon his final effort in Q3 following a spin for Sergio Perez.

“I think if we hadn’t had the yellow flag, we’d have hopefully been fighting for the front row,” Hamilton said, calling the result “really positive” after struggling so much at Spa last weekend. Mercedes are turning the corner looking at his spilt times during the session they were purple or green signalling improvements.

Toto Wolff felt confident Hamilton was in the mix for pole, revealing the team’s data showed he was up on Verstappen’s time before lifting off. Saying “On our own car data and we looked at that a lot, we were actually a tenth up before the incident.”

Mercedes certainly had the chance of victory in the race but there was also a near collision after the two drivers lost out to Verstappen at the restart. After conceding position to Verstappen and Hamilton, Russell when overtaking his teammate made contact as Hamilton tried to break the tow.

Russell explained “Obviously with that I would say, with Lewis, we just had a bit of confusion and I came out just as he defended,” Russell explained. It could have been a bit nasty but you know, we’ve got respect between the two of us so it’s all good.”

Russell also clarified his view on the Mercedes strategy amid the safety car, feeling that the team’s best chance of claiming a victory at Zandvoort was in splitting its tactics and hedging its bets. He says that Hamilton’s performance was ultimately deserving of a podium position.

Mercedes made a rare mistake which may have cost them a chance of victory in what has been a hard season for the team. But I think the feeling is they are getting ever closer in races at least to challenging for victories, its Monza next which in the last few years has thrown up surprise results.

Red Bull

Christian Horner says that no decision has yet been made regarding Red Bull joining forces with Porsche for its 2026 power unit programme. The Red Bull team principal made it clear that the team doesn’t need Porsche to finance its power unit project. We know its partnership with Honda is due to end in 2026, there are two options for Red Bull to build their own engines or team up with other partners

In theory, Red Bull and Alpha Tauri could run different PU manufacturers, although that clashes with the company philosophy of sharing technology such as gearboxes across its two teams. While Porsche has no plan B as its understood that if it were to join forces with another team, such as McLaren or Williams, it would have to badge the Audi engine.

Max Verstappen admitted that his second home race in a week didn’t start as smoothly as he wanted, he was forced to stop on track in FP1 with a transmission issue and could only manage eighth almost seven-tenths off the pace. Here is what he said about his performance in FP2, “the balance wasn’t great, but in an hour’s session you can’t really change the car a lot, so we tried to deal with what we had, and that wasn’t great today so we’ll have the night to deal with things. For sure we can do better than this.”

Asked if he was surprised by the lap time gap to Ferrari, he replied: “To be honest, while driving it I was not really surprised when I saw the lap time difference, so there is a lot of things we can improve on. We have the whole night to look at things and of course FP3 as well. I will try of course to be more competitive.”

Ferrari

Mick Schumacher and Ferrari have confirmed they will part company at the end of the season, the contract will come to what one source called a ‘natural end’ after this season.Although there has been no confirmation from Haas that he will leave the team, Antonio Giovinazzi is currently a favourite to land the seat alongside Kevin Magnussen.

I think the politics of the driver market has been partly behind this, but I’m a bit surprised given the long relationship between Ferrari and the Schumachers. but his results have picked up in recent races following the difficult start to the season, could help him.

Do we over-criticise Ferrari as the Media? Carlos Sainz believes the team is given more criticism than everybody else for its strategy and that “no one” has congratulated the team when it has made correct calls. The Italian manufacturer has been under heavy fire during the 2022 season as questionable tyre switches and ill-timed stops have further hurt a title challenge undermined by a patchy reliability record plus crashes.

We have seen the team over the last decade miss out on championship and the Italian media has a story about the team every day. Our job is to ask the questions and try to understand what and why things are happening, but the decisions we are seeing the team make in races are questionable.

Charles Leclerc believes his mistake at Botch Ten on his final run in Q3 cost him the chance of pole position. Leclerc had led the way after the first fliers in Q3 and set an even quicker first sector time on his final run to conclude qualifying. Following his error, he was left two hundredths off pole at the end of Q3.

Leclerc initially outlined a Turn 10 “mistake” as the reason why he ended up behind Verstappen and when asked to elaborate further by Motorsport.com he replied: “I’m sure nobody did the perfect lap.

Adding, “Especially in these conditions, Turn 9 and 10 are two extremely tricky corners with the tailwind there and they are much more effected than anywhere else on track. So, it was very tricky. And then with the balance of my car, I struggled quite a little bit in Turn 10 and I lost the rear and I lost like a tenth or something.

Mercedes weren’t the only team to lose out because of pit stop errors Sainz was called in late by Ferrari to make his first stop, with the team saying it was a ‘late call’ to box Sainz. Sainz had been running third in the early stages of the 72-lap race ahead of the charging Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton, before the Ferrari driver’s race unravelled in the pits.

In order to combat Hamilton’s strong pace on the medium tyres, Ferrari elected to react by calling Sainz to pit to try and maintain track position. However, the call was made while Sainz was in the final corner which resulted in a calamitous pitstop, as Ferrari’s pit crew had failed to prepare a left rear tyre in time. Sainz eventually tumbled out of the top ten.

Binotto labelled as a “mess” at the time, the Ferrari boss said: “On the first one [stop] what we did was we knew that Lewis [Hamilton] was preparing himself for a pit stop that could have undercut of ourselves. We tried to react simply to stay ahead of him which was the best way to keep track position, because we knew Lewis was very fast in the first stint of the race.

“When we saw the pit crew of Mercedes in pitlane we called our driver to pit but that was when he was in the last corner and it was too late for the mechanics to be ready. It was too late as a call based on our judgement.”

Sainz would eventually reach the chequered flag in fifth before being demoted to eighth after being hit with a five-second penalty late in the race for an unsafe release during his second pitstop.

McLaren

It was another mixed qualifying for McLaren with Lando Norris seventh but his teammate Daniel Ricciardo was knocked out in Q1. Norris once again led McLaren’s charge, but said he wasn’t very confident because he was not that far off the Alpine’s which he hadn’t expected.

He said “I had to push it a bit more and try and unlock a little bit more from the car, which I think I did and took some good steps forward. Actually by surprise ended up P7 ahead of guys we were expecting definitely to be a bit quicker than us today. So I was happy with my job, a little mistake here and there, even on my final lap but nothing that would have changed the position, so a good day for us.”

While Norris didn’t want to get overconfident because Alpine was out of position and he believes they have been quicker all weekend, he believes there were opportunities for McLaren. Looking ahead to the race he said he expected the top three teams to pull away but the opportunity to fight for seventh.

Ricciardo was knocked out in Q1 for the third time this season because of an issue at the final corner that brought an early end to his qualifying session. He explained “The second-last corner, I guess whoever in front of me it was, they went and put a wheel in the dirt or something, so as soon as I pulled out of the, call it chicane, corkscrew, whatever, and I was looking obviously up to the next apex and I could see just brown all over the track.”

“A lot of dirt and I was hoping that it wouldn’t affect the grip but it did and it cost me about three-tenths I think. So that was the difference, putting me out in Q1. I think the lap, it was okay; it wasn’t electrifying but it was definitely good enough to keep going in quali, and I think then it was a couple of tenths to find.”

Alpine

Alpine may have been in court room dramas this week, but the team will be hoping that the teams updates this weekend helps it to pull ahead in the battle for fourth in the constructors. The team has tweaked the front wing which features a shorter chord top element to help reduce drag and increase downforce.

Their out-going driver Fernando Alonso was frustrated after he came across the Red Bull of Sergio Perez on his final run in Q2,that prevented him from improving and saw him drop out of qualifying in thirteenth. The two-time champion found Perez’s Red Bull running slowly on an in-lap through the Turn 9 right-hander. The Spaniard was convinced that the had the  potential to start well inside the top 10, and made his frustration clear on team radio after realising that he had been knocked out.

he said of his session, “I think it was the traffic in Q2. I was P6, P7 all sessions so far. It was the same case in Q1 and then in Q2. On this second attempt, I was half a second better than the previous lap into Turn 9, and then I had a misunderstanding with a Red Bull in front of me, and we lost a lot in that lap. So unfortunately we are not in Q3, but the pace was there to be in Q3.”

Alpine haven’t appeared as competitive as they did last weekend at Spa, where Esteban Ocon and Alonso qualified fifth and sixth. Alonso believes that his car is almost as competitive around the very different and tight Zandvoort, although Ocon struggled more to find pace.

He added “At least in my side of the garage, I think the other side did struggle a bit more so far this weekend, but let’s see tomorrow if we can make some places. It’s going to be extremely challenging. Zandvoort is not a circuit you want to start not in the top  ten, but nothing we can do”

Alpha Tauri

AlphaTauri also brought upgrades with a revised rear wing, with the updated tip featuring a tighter transition to the endplate. There is also a larger cut-out at the back. We know the team has been underperforming compared to recent seasons but there didn’t appear to be a step forwards on track in practice

Pierre Gasly said he was not happy with the car and the changes they made after FP1 saw him come out late in FP2, he said, “So far, it’s been quite challenging, so we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us tonight and tomorrow, but I’m sure we’ll find some solutions and feel more confident heading into Quali.”

Yuki Tsunoda said he struggled with a lack of grip and his off in FP2 was caused by a gust of wind.

The team has started an investigation into the problem which caused Yuki Tsunoda to stop on track twice saying his car was ‘drifting.’ Tsunoda pulled up at the side of the track on Lap 43, reporting to AlphaTauri over the radio that not all of his tyres were fitted correctly.

Thirty seconds later, Tsunoda was told to continue as there was no data suggesting anything was wrong. He returned to the pits to have his seatbelts retightened and a different set of tyres fitted to his car. But soon after going back out on track, Tsunoda was told by his engineer to stop the car as the team had spotted a problem. Tsunoda parked near a gap in the fence by a marshal post, but a Virtual Safety Car was still required to recover his car safely.

chief engineer for vehicle performance Claudio Balestri called the issue a “car failure” in the team’s post-race press release, and confirmed it was being investigated. chief engineer for vehicle performance Claudio Balestri called the issue a “car failure” in the team’s post-race press release, and confirmed it was being investigated.

Balestri said, “After the pit stop he reported something strange at the rear of the car, we called him in again to change the tyres and immediately after we had a car failure. This is currently under investigation within the team.”

Asked by Motorsport.com about the initial stoppage, Tsunoda said he “thought there was an issue” that was “quite clear, especially at the left-rear.”

Tsunoda was handed a reprimand by the stewards for loosening his seatbelts while in the cockpit after his initial stoppage, saying he was “ready to abandon the car and started to loosen the safety belt, without unlocking it.”

Haas

Schumacher believes his eighth on the grid ticked a box as he fights for his Formula 1 future. Going into the weekend the German was dropped by Ferrari which means it is likely that he will be dropped by Haas. Schumacher sailed through the first two parts of Zandvoort qualifying in 12th and ninth places before earning eighth in the final session, helped by a hydraulic problem keeping Lance Stroll in the Aston Martin garage.

the German when asked by Motorsport.com about his afternoon said, “Obviously we still have tomorrow [Sunday] so that’s where my focus is on now. But up to now we were quite happy with the performance of today. It was a box that we wanted to tick, and we definitely ticked it. So it’s a good day today.”

If Schumacher is going to find another seat in the sport he needs to keep delivering results and he said he was surprised to have out performed expectations as they were expecting a good result to be getting into Q2.

Fast Facts

• Verstappen has won four consecutive races for the first time in his career. He is the first driver other than Lewis Hamilton to do so since Nico Rosberg won seven in a row in 2015/16.
• Red Bull led the 5,000th lap in their constructor history today.
• George Russell’s P2 tied his career-best result from the rain-curtailed Spa race in 2021 and marks his first second place in a full Grand Prix. He has moved ahead of Carlos Sainz into fourth in the drivers’ championship, and is only 13 points away from second-placed Charles Leclerc, without having won a race
• McLaren’s Lando Norris was seventh on grid, seventh in race, and is seventh in the drivers’ championship. Norris has finished seventh in four of the last five races.

Results Summary

Championship Standings