2024 F1 Round 15, Dutch Grand Prix race: Norris takes dominant 22.896-second victory to end Verstappen's unbeaten home record at Zandvoort

On August 25 (China Standard Time, UTC+8), the Dutch Grand Prix race, round 15 of the 2024 F1 season, concluded after 72 laps at Zandvoort. Starting from pole, Norris claimed a dominant victory by a massive 22.896 seconds, securing his second win of the season and the largest winning margin of the 2024 campaign so far—ending Verstappen’s unbeaten record at his home circuit of Zandvoort. Ferrari’s Leclerc completed the podium in third, while RB’s Yuki Tsunoda started 11th and dropped six places to finish 17th.

The race’s turning points came on laps 1 and 18. Losing out at the start once again, Norris was passed by Verstappen on lap 1. By lap 4, Verstappen had pulled clear of DRS range, but the RB20 did not have the pace to hold on for victory: on lap 18, Norris made a decisive move up the inside at Turn 1 to retake the lead and never looked back, disappearing into the distance with dominant pace. He even set the race’s fastest lap on the final lap on a set of used hard tyres that had already completed 45 laps, adding one extra point. The victory reduced Norris’s deficit to Verstappen in the drivers’ championship to 70 points. “The start was good and I did my best, but there clearly wasn’t enough pace,” Verstappen admitted after the race, “so I focused on my own race, with second place as the target.”

“It feels fantastic. Although the first lap once again kept it from being a perfect race, it was still a great race,” a beaming Norris said. “The pace was very strong, and the car was unbelievably good.” The upgraded MCL38 comprehensively outclassed its rivals not only in qualifying but also in the race, offering hints of Red Bull’s dominance of old—perhaps a turning point in the balance of power in the 2024 season.

There was a surprise in the battle for the final podium place. Leclerc, starting sixth, moved ahead by pitting first to execute an undercut, then withstood Piastri’s relentless attacks for the rest of the race to hold on to third, with Piastri finishing fourth. Sainz, who was able to start 10th thanks to Albon’s disqualification from qualifying, showed strong pace and took fifth from Perez. Russell had been running fifth with 20 laps to go, but unexpected tyre degradation forced him to fit softs and switch to a two-stop strategy. A right-front tyre change taking 3.4 seconds at his first stop compounded his problems, and he ultimately had to settle for seventh; Hamilton, who had been eliminated in Q2, bounced back from 14th on the grid to finish eighth, tying with Yuki Tsunoda for the biggest change in position of any driver. Gasly finished ninth; with nine laps remaining, Alonso passed Hulkenberg, who persevered through 57 laps on hard tyres, to claim the final point. Albon, starting 19th at the back of the grid, finished 14th.

Yuki Tsunoda’s race was a struggle from the start. Having received encouragement from Marko before the race, he started 11th targeting the points, but his soft-tyre start failed to deliver a pace advantage. Hulkenberg passed him on lap 1 and Hamilton on lap 2, with the relatively low track temperature perhaps leaving the tyres slow to reach their operating window. His fortunes never improved: on lap 33, he made the second stop of his two-stop strategy to switch to hard tyres. In the closing stages, despite having tyres 10 laps fresher than his rival’s, he never managed to pass Sargeant and ultimately finished 17th, losing six places—the biggest drop in the field. Team principal Mekies admitted the two-stop strategy was “a bit of a gamble”: “It didn’t work; he spent most of the time stuck in traffic.”

The race ran for 72 laps, with the winner completing it in 1 hour 30 minutes 45.519 seconds. In a week’s time, F1 will head to Monza for the Italian Grand Prix.