The Dutch Touch
It took four years but we finally have a driver battle on our hands.
70 points separate Lando Norris from Max Verstappen with nine races to go in the season. If Lando wins every remaining race and Verstappen finds a way to finish second in those races, Lando will come up 7 points short. If Lando gets fastest lap in each of those grand prix then the two will be tied on points. Lando will have more wins though and would take the championship.
That’s a tall order, but Lando doesn’t really have to run the table. Tho, since Lando’s McLaren finished almost 23 seconds ahead of the rest of the field this weekend, a season remaining sweep is not out of the question.
That Adrian Newey is basically no longer innovating for Red Bull, and that Oscar Piastri, George Russell, Lewis Hamilton, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz all have the chance to pop in for victory, or at least second, at some point gives Norris some breathing room.
Logan “Latifi” Sargeant is also bound to crash in to Verstappen eventually. If that happens, the picture gets a little easier for Lando to make a real run. The juiciest scenario would be somehow if Lando and Max are tied on points at Abu Dhabi at the last race with Max in the lead only to have Sargeant take out some TECPRO barrier and throw a late safety car that somehow gives Lando the win and the championship. It’s not like something like this has ever happened in F1 before. LOL.
Lando’s current surge sets up a lot of interesting season-ending scenarios. Though Lando certainly earned some karma by stepping aside for Oscar to get his maiden win this year. Will Oscar do the same if he’s earned a race lead, but asked to cede position for driver’s champion point reasons in one of the next few races?
Will Verstappen channel his inner Schumacher and crash into Lando a couple times just to kill Lando’s points momentum?
What is already remarkable is the usually feisty win-at-all-costs Verstappen is already saying stuff like “I’m happy with second [place]” in post-race press conferences, suggesting that maybe the killer instinct has been lost.
Maybe that’s what three years of owning the field does to you? But if so that also makes it even more extraordinary when you consider that Lewis and Merc somehow kept that pace up for seven years without faltering.
They only fell when James Allison walked away from the engineering department. He’s now back and they’ve looked like they’re finding their way back again with wins in two of the last four races.
Though Merc did have a disastrous weekend by their standards with Lewis running an awful quali lap and missing a rare Q3. If Lewis had made Q3, he probably had a shot at a podium in the Netherlands given that for a significant part of the race he was putting in fastest laps and managed to move up 7 spots on a track where it’s notoriously hard to pass.
George ran a good race, but seems to be unable to extract the maximum out of the car during quali. Merc did him no favors by pitting him late on the fear that Sainz would catch him. Sainz might have, but I doubt Checo would. This led to seventh place that could have been a fifth or sixth.
Russell has had some flashes this year. His was peaking before the break. But, also this reminds me that of all the Drive to Survive young guns who should have made it by now, George’s ascent is very slow and linear.
Still Russell, Leclerc, Norris, and Max have all fulfilled some level of their promise. The two guys who are probably the most talented from that crop but still continue to suffer more than the others are Gasly and Ocon.
Given that Gasly is driving like a 1987 Yugo version of an F1 car, his ninth place this weekend was extraordinary. Gasly and Ocon are both so talented that I suspect if either of them was in a Mclaren, they’d be running Lando-quality laps.
They both have race seats for 2025, but their window feels like it’s closing. There’s a good chance Ollie Bearman is gonna give Ocon a good head to head run at Haas next year. I don’t have enough data to determine if Jack Doohan will do the same with Gasly, but along with him and Kimi Antonelli likely in at Merc, F1 is getting ready to finally move on a little bit from the old heads.
Sadly one of the old heads at risk for 2025 is my guy Valtteri Bottas. He still has a shot at the remaining Audi seat alongside Nico Hulkenberg, but you never know.
Even the young heads are not immune. There’s a lot of talk that Latifi has finally crashed one car too many when he dipped his Williams into the grass and had a massive shunt in to the metal barrier just before quali in Zandvoort.
The rumor is now Mick Schumacher may get a mid-season look alongside Alex Albon. I was said to see quick Mick go. I don’t think he got a fair shot and as much as we’ve benefitted from the drama of Kevin Magnussen’s loco driving this year, it would have been nice if Schumacher had been in the middle of his fourth season instead of being a Merc reserve driver Toto’s headphone homie in the pits.
Given that next week’s race is at Monza, home of Ferrari and the place Mick’s Dad made history, it would be amazing timing. Will it happen? I guess we’ll see in a few days.