Lando Norris cautious, Kimi Antonelli wake-up call, Oscar Piastri position, Talking Points

Lando Norris has taken his second consecutive grand prix pole position, but the reigning world champion doesn’t want you to think this is the beginning of a title turnaround.

When Norris stormed to a dominant victory in Hungary before the midseason break, there was tentative optimism that the upgraded McLaren was the real deal and finally on a championship-contending path.

Equipped with more upgrades this weekend, McLaren has spent the round at the pointy end of the field, and now Norris will start the grand prix from top spot, having bested both Mercedes drivers and teammate Oscar Piastri in another tight qualifying session.

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With overtaking difficult at Circuit Zandvoort, Norris should be favourite to make it two wins from two — and not a moment too soon if he wants to defend his title.

But after fading badly in the sprint, dropping from second to third and almost to fourth in a handful of laps as his rear tyres gave up, Norris doesn’t see it that way.

“I just don’t have the pace in general, especially the slow-speed corners,” he said after the short race. “We just struggle so much compared to the others.

“There’s nothing we can do. It’s just the car is very good in high speed and it’s just nowhere near good enough in slow speed.

“To be able to keep up was very difficult. I can’t over-push in high speed during the race, and therefore we can’t optimise our strengths and more of our weaknesses show, and therefore the pace was not good enough today.”

Though he squeezed enough extra from the car to turn his Friday 0.041s deficit into a 0.102s advantage, he saw no reason to think that turnaround would translate to better race pace.

“Certainly [worried],” he said. “We’ve not changed those things. The car is still not our car.

“It’s certainly the best in high speed, no doubt — or I have the biggest balls, I don’t know! — but it’s very, very strong there, and in low speed we just really still struggle too much to be confident about everything.

“We definitely made maybe a little bit of progress, but it’s still going to be the trickier side of things tomorrow.”

Piastri gave a similar impression — happy with his one-lap pace but cautious about predicting the race outcome.

“Honestly, I’ve been a lot happier this weekend,” he said after qualifying -0.142 off pole. “Especially over one lap, I feel things have come a lot more naturally.

“I’m not having to try and chase my tail to really find a lot of progress. That’s been nice.

“Hopefully we’re a bit stronger [in the race]. The sprint wasn’t great in terms of race pace, so hopefully we’re a bit stronger there, but we’ll have to wait and see.”

It’s not unusual for Norris to play down his chances, and he knows that track position will give him a strong chance to win — just as Piastri had a shot at beating him in Budapest after taking the lead on the first lap.

But in this instance even Russell knows Norris is speaking the truth.

RUSSELL CONFIDENT BEHIND NORRIS — AND AHEAD OF ANTONELLI

Russell’s positive reset is moving at pace on this side of the midseason break. He converted sprint pole to victory with ease, and though he missed out on pole position for the grand prix, the Briton seemed completely unperturbed — confident, even.

“I think we’re in a great place, to be honest,” he enthused. “Obviously we’ve got Kimi [Antonelli] and me in P2 and P3, so it gives us a bit of an opportunity to put Lando under a bit of pressure strategically.

“I think we probably have a slightly faster race car than those guys. I think, as Lando said, they look very strong in the high-speed corners, and on a track like this with high tyre degradation, you can’t really utilise that performance as much in the race because it just puts too much stress in the tyres, so I think it will come towards us.”

Russell was also buoyed by Ferrari flopping to fifth and sixth after having looked very competitive in the sprint.

Perhaps more than that, though, is that this was another session he finished ahead of teammate Antonelli.

Russell was dominated by Antonelli in the first half of the season, and though he chipped away at his points deficit in the sprint, the margin is still a foreboding 53 points with 11 or 12 grands prix remaining, including today’s race.

The road back is long, but it starts with being competitive relative to the teenager sharing his garage — and he’s been on the front foot all weekend in that regard.

But he also acknowledged that he’s been stronger than Antonelli all season in sprint races — he has three sprint poles and a pair of wins, while Antonelli has none of either — and that speed doesn’t count for much without execution.

“The results haven’t been there, but I think the underlying performance hasn’t been as bad as the results have probably shown,” he said.

“I’m just going to take it race by race. I’m not going to come away from this weekend and say all issues are resolved.

“But after the break, I just feel way more relaxed. I don’t feel like I’ve got anything to lose.

“The pressure’s off. I’m just going to go out, enjoy it, and I don’t even really feel in a fight.

“[The title is] not mine to lose, it’s mine to gain. That’s the mentality I’ve got, and I feel it’s going to help me. I’m just enjoying driving.”

ANTONELLI’S ‘WAKE-UP CALL’

It’s not the first time this season Russell has attempted explicitly to pile the pressure onto his teammate. In what’s so far been a losing battle, attempting to exploit Antonelli’s young age and inexperience might be the only weapon he has to fight back — not that it’s looked effective at any point.

Antonelli has already proved more than capable of bouncing back from setbacks, whether self-imposed or wrought by unreliability and external circumstances.

And though we’ve become accustomed to Antonelli beating Russell, it’s far from unusual for the opposite to happen.

Antonelli is up on Russell 7-5 in grand prix qualifying this season and has never outqualified his teammate more than three grands prix in a row. That head-to-head count tightens to 9-8 when including sprint qualifying.

You could therefore hardly call his 0.031s defeat to his teammate a turning of the tide of itself. You could hardly even call it unusual.

But both his qualifying performances this weekend were scrappy.

He damaged his car in the gravel in SQ1 on Friday, inflating his margin to Russell, and then me made a mistake at the first turn of his final Q3 lap on Saturday. It cost him 0.3s, but he managed to earn almost all of that time back over the rest of the lap — in fact he was fractionally ahead of Russell out of the final corner but ran out of battery quicker, dropping him behind.

This, more than the results, is what Antonelli has taken away from the weekend so far.

“I don’t feel any extra pressure,” he said. “But it was a very good wake-up call this weekend that you can never lower your guard.

“It’s not that I’m driving more tense or anything, but I just feel this weekend is a good wake-up call, and to just again put things in the right place at the right time and just deliver the result when it counts.”

He made similar comments in Austria, when he was last beaten in qualifying by Russell. There he reflected that he “lowered the intensity a bit too much” after feeling he had the weekend in hand after practice — he’d become complacent, in other words.

He outqualified Russell at the three subsequent races by an average of 0.4s and grew his championship advantage by 19 points.

Perhaps this weekend will be a warning for both Mercedes drivers.

FERRARI FLOPS DESPITE STRONG SPRINT

Is that the sound coming out of the Ferrari title balloon?

The Italian team underperformed in Hungary, where it was favourite to win — and should have had the pace to do so — but where it couldn’t even get one of its drivers onto the podium.

The Zandvoort layout should have suited the Ferrari car similarly, but then Lewis Hamilton qualified fifth, 0.331s off the pace, with teammate Charles Leclerc one place and 0.064s further back.

On a weekend Ferrari brought more upgrades — though it is yet to introduce its new engine — the scarlet cars looked completely non-threatening.

It was in equal parts dispiriting and surprising for the team. Leclerc had been in the mix for sprint pole on Friday, and despite being the only frontrunner to start on soft tyres in the sprint race, he was probably the closest match in pace to Russell, chasing him down — albeit in vain — in the final laps.

“Honestly, mixed feelings,” said Ferrari boss Frederic Vasseur. “I’m a bit disappointed by the result of quali today.

“We were targeting probably a bit better [considering] the pace that we had this morning in the race and the pace of the quali yesterday.

“We could’ve done a better job today, but the race is tomorrow.

“For tomorrow everything is open. The start will be difficult, and then the strategy will be a challenge, but let’s see.”

Hamilton and Leclerc offered vastly different takes on the qualifying result. Hamilton was encouraged by car changes that improved the balance and left him optimistic he could move forwards in the race. Leclerc felt like the car was behaving erratically and had stepped backwards from the sprint.

Overtaking will be difficult — it always is at Zandvoort — and strategy will be key.

On this front Ferrari might have an ace. It’s the only frontrunning team to have saved a new set of softs for both drivers, and Leclerc proved in the sprint that the soft compound can be competitive — in fact his move on Norris for second place was one of only two overtakes after the first lap.

The tyre delta could be decisive, with the race poised between one and two stops. Ferrari will have to play its cards right, but it has a chance to salvage a decent result ahead of its home Italian Grand Prix coming up next.

F1 MUST CHOOSE SPRINT DESTINATIONS CAREFULLY

This is the final Dutch Grand Prix. Though the event has been a wild success since returning to the calendar in 2021, it does not attract any government funding, and with race host fees escalating, the private operators opted against betting that they could avoid the sort of financial ruination that has impacted other European circuits.

In a bid to go out on a high, Zandvoort hosted its first and only sprint race this weekend.

Though circuits bid for sprint races, Formula 1 says it also considers which venues are likely to produce great action for the 30-minute, no-strategy format.

On paper the narrow, medium-speed seaside track isn’t an obvious candidate for a short race given overtaking is typically difficult.

It turns out that’s the case in actuality too.

There were only two genuine overtakes for the entire 24-lap soporific spectacle: Leclerc on Norris for second place and Fernando Alonso on Valtteri Bottas for 19th. Carlos Sainz also passed Nico Hülkenberg early in the race, but the Audi driver was battling a car problem that sent him to his garage one lap later.

Leclerc said his overtake was largely down to a difference in battery power.

“Here in Zandvoort it’s close to impossible to overtake, and I could have never made the overtake if there wasn’t a different deployment strategy between teams,” he said.

Battery management is a legitimate strategic tool available to the drivers, but Leclerc also noted that by Sunday most teams have converged on similar battery usage, neutralising it as an overtaking aid to some extent.

“I don’t expect big differences coming tomorrow,” he said. “Also, throughout the season I think we’ve seen the first two, three races there was a lot of action a bit everywhere because I think everybody was not so sure about what was the right thing to do.

“Now, again, everybody seems to converge more or less in the same place.”

Russell, who will be eyeing a victory chance, said only a big tyre delta — the difference between old and fresh tyres — will make overtaking possible.

Difficulty overtaking doesn’t make a bad track or even necessarily a bad grand prix spectacle. Pressure and strategy can fill in the gaps, and the tension of defending a lead can make a great race.

But those factors largely don’t apply in sprint races, which are explicitly about wheel-to-wheel action.

Formula 1 has heavily hinted that next year will feature many more sprints — perhaps as many as 10 or 12 in a 24-round season.

Zandvoort has proved — and Singapore, the last sprint of the year, will likely prove too — that the sport will have to be judicious in choosing the right venues to host the short race.