Lando Norris detailed how he and McLaren managed to turn things around to win the Dutch GP of Formula 1, after having ‘lost the fire’ in the Sprint race.
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In the Saturday race, after starting from second place, the Brit finished third after struggling with the balance of the MCL40. However, in the later qualifying, he secured pole position and in the Sunday (23) battle in Zandvoort, managed to convert it into his second win of the season.
When commenting on the place this win holds in his collection of achievements, the 2025 Formula 1 champion detailed how he managed to save his weekend after the disappointing Sprint. “[I rate this victory] very highly, because it was a hard-fought achievement in many aspects and, more than that, because of the turnaround from Saturday to Sunday. I was quite disappointed [on Saturday]; seeing how much we struggled in the Sprint kind of took some of my spirit away. I know it’s just a Sprint, but every point counts and we really didn’t have the pace,” he said.
“I didn’t have that something extra that gave me life inside the car. On Saturday night, we worked very, very hard. I spent a lot of time with my engineers to understand what we could do better: how to push more, how to better save the tires, and how to do everything in a better way than I had been doing and better than everyone else. And I certainly believe I managed to do that. So, aside from the start, it was a race of ups and downs, because the beginning, the first stint, was quite bad and kind of reminded me of the Sprint; but we put on the hard tires, things came to life and the race really started to go my way.”
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“It’s simply the awareness of being able to win. I didn’t have that [in the Sprint]. I didn’t think we had the pace to win, or rather, we didn’t have the pace to win, and that didn’t give me much hope for the race, even with pole position; and certainly not after the first lap, having lost positions at the start and with the performance of the first stint,” he continued.
“But I know that when the car gives me what I want, and on top of that, when I’m driving at the current level, I can win races. And that’s exactly what happened: in the first stint, I didn’t have what I wanted from the car. We put on the hard tires, we were a bit more aggressive in how we wanted to approach that part of the race, we turned things around and I felt in the car exactly what I wanted. I went from a feeling that I wouldn’t win the race to thinking: ‘at least we can force [Antonelli] to make mistakes’.”
“He started making a lot more mistakes when I was right behind. We forced Mercedes to take action regarding strategy. That gave us room to attack and extend the stint; so, it’s like this: when I get what I need from the car, when I have the front as I want, when I have confidence in the rear on corner entries, when I finally get what’s necessary to know and predict every corner, then I will win a race. But if I don’t have that, as happened in the first part, for example, then there’s not much I can do,” he concluded.
