Logan Sargeant’s thunderous crash in Holland on Saturday, a quarter of an hour after the third free practice session had started, turned the qualifying round of a World Championship that, after the summer break, is entering its most decisive stage upside down. As has happened in the last two years, Max Verstappen is at the top of the points table, with a considerably comfortable margin (78 points) over his closest pursuer, Lando Norris. However, the drift of some teams and others and the supervision by the stewards of all the cars, have had a disruptive effect that has made the championship much more unpredictable than it had been before. The worst news for Red Bull, the best for all the fans, except for the majority in Zandvoort, absolutely devoted to Mad Max.
The general feeling is that the red buffalo brand arrived at the first stop of the calendar with the best car, but that its RB20 was losing that hegemony as the races went by. Statistics are sovereign in F1 and confirm this impression. Verstappen took pole position in the first seven Grand Prix of the year and won them all. In the following eight he only started first on one occasion (Austria). This Sunday (3:00 p.m., Dazn), the three-time champion will not be able to start without traffic in front because it will be Norris who will do so, even though he will do so close to the British driver from McLaren, who continues with the positive inertia with which he went on vacation. This is the third pole of the season for the driver from Somerset (Great Britain), the third in his service record. Fernando Alonso will start seventh, while Carlos Sainz could not sneak into the third qualifying round, and will start eleventh.
Verstappen is more exposed than usual. His power car is starting to be vulnerable and forces him to bring out, on every fast lap, that magic that makes the boy from Hasselt so special. At Zandvoort, where he has remained unbeaten since 2021, the bad weather, especially the wind, made his car give him more trouble than expected. It was he who put him on the front row if we take into account that the other Red Bull, that of the always disputed Checo Pérez, will line up in third (fifth place). “We lack a bit of pace. It’s very windy and that makes things complicated. I’m happy to have gotten on the front row. We don’t have the easiest car to drive, you have to be realistic,” summed up Verstappen, beaten on his best lap by Norris, by more than three tenths, an unusually large margin. “An incredible day. I did a good lap, everything was smooth. The car is working well, we have some improvements for the first time in a while,” agreed Norris.
McLaren is going through a sweet moment. Depending on how you look at it, one of the sweetest in its history, if we take into account where it comes from and all the limitations that currently exist to recover lost ground. The days when money in itself won races are long gone, and even more important than that, even further behind is the period when McLaren was one of the richest teams. Following the collapse of the team, less than a decade ago, Zak Brown took the reins, cleaned up the accounts and the departments to start an odyssey towards reconquest that is going down the best of paths, as was once again made clear this Saturday in Holland, where the Woking structure was, without any other possible consideration, the most efficient of all: it was the only one that managed to get both its cars through the first two rounds (Q1 and Q2), using only one set of tyres, to then put together an almost perfect qualifying round, with Norris first in line and Oscar Piastri, his neighbour in the workshop, third.
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