Formula 1 resumed at Zandvoort after the (forced) summer break. This reset also gave the drivers a chance to calmly and thoughtfully analyze what didn’t go right in the first 14 Grands Prix. There was a lot of anticipation for Lando Norris’ return, especially given his disappointing end to the first part of the season where Oscar Piastri showed greater solidity, even mentally. The strong English driver from Bristol could not have responded better, taking pole position in the Dutch GP qualifying, beating Max Verstappen by three and a half tenths, his teammate by half a second, the first Mercedes (Russell) by almost six tenths, and the first Ferrari (Charles Leclerc) by a full nine tenths.
However, the points are scored on Sunday, the day when Lando Norris has shown a tendency to waste too many opportunities this season, where he is the main challenger to Max Verstappen in the drivers’ championship. “It’s a fantastic day today,” Norris said after the pole. “The car was fantastic, and the updates we introduced for the first time in a while worked very well.” However, the package brought by McLaren to the Netherlands is more significant in terms of components than in lap time improvement. “Every new component we have on the car is worth a few milliseconds,” said Rob Marshall, the technical director of the Woking team, earlier. These updates are more aerodynamic optimizations than major evolutions, with the most sensitive area of these new-generation cars, the floor, only seeing improvements in the cleanliness of the many supports on the side.
In short, Lando Norris didn’t take pole position thanks to the updates, as Andrea Stella confirmed after the qualifying session for the Formula 1 Dutch Grand Prix. “The updates didn’t give us three-tenths; Lando’s advantage is a combination of several factors,” clarified the Woking team’s principal after qualifying. The circuit layout is certainly favorable to the MCL38, and even a Red Bull with a hybrid floor on Verstappen’s car—featuring solutions from the start of the season (Bahrain Spec) like the initial skid—could not counter it. Reverting to the old skid was intended to make the car more comfortable for the three-time world champion, but due to the strong wind, the goal wasn’t achieved, at least in qualifying. “Today, I never felt comfortable with the car. There were always one or two corners where it felt like I was losing a lot of time. The car also had a different balance on every lap, making everything very difficult,” said the three-time world champion after qualifying.
Ferrari disappointment: Charles Leclerc did his best, but the SF-24 still has the same flaws as at the start of the season and no strengths
Among the top four teams, Ferrari was the most disappointing in the Dutch Grand Prix qualifying. Charles Leclerc was nine-tenths behind Lando Norris: three and a half tenths in the first sector, four-tenths in the second, and a tenth and a half in the fastest third sector. The serious issue is that, aside from the disappointing performance, the SF-24 still has the exact same problems as at the start of the season, such as poor extraction of maximum potential from new tires and poor performance in long corners. These problems were evident in China, the fifth race of the season, and have persisted through 10 additional events and two significant update packages brought to the track (Imola and Spain).
In Q3, Charles Leclerc managed to improve by just over a tenth and a half between his first attempt on used tires and his second and final attempt on new Softs. He also only improved his best Q2 time by a tenth, while Perez improved by almost three-tenths, and Norris and Verstappen by a full eight-tenths, thanks to a single Q2 attempt. This is another problem that has plagued Ferrari all season and has not been resolved or significantly improved in 15 races. This is what should be worrying, along with a car that lacks “overall performance,” as Leclerc put it, meaning it lacks competitiveness in every area. The strengths from the start of the season have been eroded in an effort to improve performance in other types of corners (the slow ones), but the competition has made much more significant progress, overshadowing all the improvements made to the SF-24. After the Netherlands, a circuit that had been highlighted in red for weeks at Maranello, the updates arriving in the next races will need to reinvigorate a car that has now consistently become the fourth fastest and, more importantly, will need to definitively show whether the SF-24 project has intrinsic limits that cannot be fully corrected through development this season. This might also explain why so much effort (including financial) is being put into reworking the chassis and much of the mechanics for the first Ferrari of Lewis Hamilton, as explained by Formula 1 expert Piergiuseppe Donadoni for formu1a.uno.
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