Ferrari is bracing for a challenging Dutch Grand Prix, as the 15th round of the 2024 Formula 1 championship confirms the problems of the Italian team. A car that is difficult to drive, showing a clear lack of performance at the 4.259-kilometre Circuit Zandvoort due to various factors. Before discussing these issues, let’s touch on another topic. Observing the comparison between Max Verstappen and Lando Norris confirms the impressions from Friday: Red Bull, thanks to its stiffer setup, performs well in medium-to-high-speed corners.
This allows them to be more aggressive on the throttle and keep the foot on the gas longer. However, they encounter significant difficulties in medium-slow corners, where McLaren, with a softer setup (perhaps in anticipation of possible rain), proves incredibly solid.
A softer setup allows the car to handle better in slow corners and perfectly copy the curbs, enabling a more aggressive driving style at low speeds, as seen with Lando Norris in turn 11 entry and turn 12 exit (where he has much better traction than the Dutchman, who struggles with oversteer on exit). Car number 4 seems to be on rails: it handles all typical understeer corners like turns 9 and 10 perfectly, without any need for micro-corrections, which are evident in Max Verstappen’s driving.
In fact, being able to cleanly enter turn 10 avoids generating oversteer on exit (which car number 1 suffers from), allowing a 0.100s gain in the stretch leading to turn 11 with a +3 kilometers per hour speed advantage.
Finally, from the telemetry data related to the G-Force, we can further appreciate Red Bull’s strength in high-speed sections and McLaren’s power in braking and traction, factors that contributed to placing Lando Norris’s papaya-orange car on pole position with a 0.356s gap from the second-place finisher.
Now let’s analyze the comparison between the telemetry of Lando Norris’s pole lap and Charles Leclerc’s lap, which was 0.909 seconds behind the British driver. As already anticipated by the FP2 telemetry analysis, Ferrari once again proved to be very nervous and difficult to drive for both drivers in qualifying. Unfortunately, since the final free practice session was almost entirely canceled, the Maranello team could not test the changes made to the car’s setup during the night in free practice, which inevitably affected the performance of the two drivers in red.
Charles Leclerc immediately encountered difficulties in turn 1, where he struggled with mid-corner understeer, preventing him from fully accelerating as Lando did. Norris was one of the few drivers to take this banking corner cleanly and without corrections. The Monegasque driver’s lack of confidence in his car also led him to take turn 3, the 18° banked corner, much tighter than almost all other drivers, not fully using the track and inevitably being late on the throttle.
This inaccuracy cost him up to turn 6, where Lando Norris’s acceleration curve was much wider on exit from turn 3. In turn 6, Charles Leclerc was 6 kilometers per hour slower, while in turn 7, he lost 12 kilometers per hour and had to apply the brake to load the front end more.
Oversteer reappeared in the middle of turn 10, turning into exit oversteer. This exaggerated oversteer caused him to lose about 0.2 seconds compared to the Brit, a mistake that carried over to turn 11, where he entered perhaps a bit too early, going slightly wide and failing to set up turn 12 optimally. In fact, he even touched the inside gravel with his left front tire, a mistake that cost him another 0.150 seconds.
The micro-sector map is clear: McLaren dominates almost the entire track, with Lando Norris driving exceptionally. Meanwhile, the G-Force stats confirms what was observed on Friday: a Ferrari that manages to defend itself in traction and a McLaren that proves to be very strong in braking this weekend.
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