Max Verstappen, Lando Norris talk about F1 Dutch GP start and the eventual situation where the Brit took a dominant win.
When Red Bull’s Verstappen passed McLaren’s Norris at the start of F1 Dutch GP, it looked like a good situation for the Dutchman after losing out in qualifying. But he couldn’t stretch his legs and soon started to come under pressure from the Brit.
For Verstappen, it didn’t come as a surprise that he lost out to Norris in the end. He managed to get a good start but as noted above, he didn’t have enough legs to shrug off the Brit and the tyre degradation kicked-in at a crucial phase of the race.
Once in the lead, Verstappen was not worried about what Norris was doing. He did all he could but was aware about the situation around him. “I think the start was all right,” he said. “I had a bit of wheelspin as well. But I think Checo had a good start as well also on the left-hand side. So I think, yeah, we just got it right as a team probably also.
“And we have been doing quite well with that in most races this year. But it’s also, I think, a bit more difficult to predict because the weather this weekend has been raining, drying, so you don’t really get a consistent grip rate. So sometimes, yeah, it’s a bit hit and miss. I was just doing my own race, looking after the tyres, I tried to do the best I could.
“But yeah, at one point, nothing was turning or responding anymore. So then Lando got quite close the first time, like he said, he was close, but not close enough. And then the next lap, there was nothing that I could do. So once he passed, I just focused on doing my race, tried to bring it to the end in second.
“The whole weekend has been the same. I mean, I had pretty much the same balance from FP1 all the way to the race. I mean, the limitations are the same. So yeah, it’s just very hard to solve at the moment. Yeah, it just seems like we are too slow, but also quite bad on 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,” summed up Verstappen, as Norris explained his side and if he thought the race went out of his hands after the start.
There was confidence to win despite losing out and he remained calm about the situation. “No, I mean, after yesterday, of course, we were confident the pace was going to be good, for sure. My long-run pace on Friday was very good, but you don’t do anything more than, like, 10, 11 laps, and you never know in the 72-lap race what’s going to happen,” said Norris.
“But I would say also Max’s pace didn’t look bad on Friday. You could already pick apart a bit of it and kind of give yourself some confidence, It wasn’t like we came into here thinking, ‘yeah, we can easily just pass him on track’ and pull the gap that we did today. It’s just not often that I’ve been in the lead and being able to control things and do what I want to do and look after the tyres and have clean air and stuff like that.
“And all of this makes a big difference in the end of the day. So I didn’t expect things to go as well as it did. After getting done into Turn 1 and off the line, I was actually just surprisingly calm, maybe because I’m a bit used to going backwards at the start. I’m very prepared for those kind of scenarios.
“And I was very calm and just, ‘OK, well, what can I do now?’ And that was just to look ahead, start saving tyres, see what I had pace wise. But really even like lap 10, 11, 12, 13, I kind of managed to catch Max a little bit again and started to gain quite a bit of optimism that actually I could almost pass him on track. So I had two opportunities.
“The first one, I wasn’t quite close enough. The next lap I did it and I could get my head down from there,” summed up Norris, who stressed that it isn’t an easy solution to get the starts right. He knows he has to be consistent and he will continue to work on it.
“Obviously not, because otherwise I would have done better then,” said Norris. “But I mean, we know what to do. We know what’s required to do a perfect start. But we’re talking about fine margins here. Because we both didn’t get it right, it seems like maybe there was more underlying issue or something wasn’t how it was supposed to be, or we’ve clearly misjudged something more than what others did.
“But Oscar’s one of the best starters on the grid. I’m not as good as him, but there or thereabouts. I’m not a bad starter, but not as good as obviously what we need to be. Again, it was a race which almost slipped away off the line, but today was, again, different to every other thing that’s happened. So, kind of like I said before the weekend, we need to find a bit more consistency, but we’ve worked on it and I feel like I’ve done better procedurally, but obviously didn’t turn into the correct thing.”
Here’s race start: https://www.formula1.com/en/video/2024-dutch-grand-prix-verstappen-jumps-norris-to-take-the-lead.1808365125618238557
Here’s re-pass: https://www.formula1.com/en/video/2024-dutch-grand-prix-norris-overtakes-verstappen-to-retake-the-lead.1808368857854760937
Here’s how F1 Dutch GP panned out
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