Norris must reverse his run of poor starts from first place to see off Verstappen

The England men’s soccer team is notorious for losing penalty shootouts at major tournaments. But the Three Lions actually have a success rate of 36.36%.

That’s infinitely better than Lando Norris’ conversion rate when it comes to keeping the lead from pole position. He started at the sharp end five times in F1 and lost the lead every time.

What’s more, he’s always lost the lead to a different driver. Last time, in Hungary, it was to his team mate Oscar Piastri, and there were four other instances before then.

That means that the English soccer team are orders of magnitude more successful at winning penalty shootouts than Norris is at keeping the lead into turn one when starting from pole position.

On Sunday, the driver of car number four with have his fourth attempt at leading the field away at the start of a grand prix – and for the third time this season. Alongside him on the front row of the grid, looking to keep Norris’s losing streak intact, will be Max Verstappen. Not just the driver Norris is trying to chase down in the world championship over the final ten rounds of the season, but the one who the several thousand fans who flock to the Zandvoort circuit will be roaring in support of throughout the race.

While overtaking is possible at Zandvoort, it is by no means easy. The narrow nature of the circuit gives an advantage to the leading driver by limiting the places to pass with F1’s largest, heaviest cars. That means if Norris wants to start the second phase of the season in the best possible fashion, by taking his second victory of the year, holding onto the lead at the start for the first time will go a long way towards achieving that.

But Norris insists that he is not concerned by his conversion rate as he looks ahead to the grand prix.

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“I know my stats are not the best for that,” the pole winner said. “And more often than not, I’ve kind of gone backwards rather than holding positions. But that’s just what I’ve done so far. And I’ve worked hard and working hard to try and change that.

“I’m not going to go out tomorrow to try and suddenly prove people wrong or something. I’m just going to crack on and do what I got to do.”

Weather

Over the middle phase of the championship, the weather has played a recurring role in the narrative of many race weekends. It has been no different in Zandvoort, where two of the four F1 track sessions so far have required wet or intermediate tyres.

Thankfully, there is a much lower chance that rain will return to complicate the most important session of the weekend. Current forecasts have the risk of rain at around 10% leading up to lights out at 3pm, with the clouds eventually clearing as the race goes on.

But more than rain, the more influential factor will be wind. This has been an historically blustery grand prix weekend so far, with virtually every driver in the field expressing having had difficulties with the unpredictable balance of their cars in the wind. On Sunday, wind speeds of up to 20mph are still expected to challenge the drivers over the 72 laps of the race.

“When you see the numbers of the car in terms of kilograms of force, of downforce gained and lost, it’s pretty extreme,” Norris explained after qualifying. “Probably more than what people realise on the outside. Everyone’s dealing with the same thing and that’s the challenge of what we have.”

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Start

Norris will attempt to successfully defend his lead from pole position for the first time in his Formula 1 career on Sunday, while Verstappen will be looking to keep his perfect record of leading the opening lap of every home grand prix of his career intact.

But one major difference between the three circuits Norris has previously started from pole from – Sochi, Barcelona and the Hungaroring – and Zandvoort is how much shorter the run to the first corner will be on Sunday. Whereas the previous three circuits have an average run of 617 metres from pole position to their first corners, Norris only has to keep ahead for 265m this time around.

Even if Norris does swing out of Tarzan ahead, that will not be the end of the story, however. The race ‘start’ will effectively run from the first corner to the extreme banked third turn of Hugenholtz. If Verstappen is able to stick with Norris through the first corner, then the unique nature of the third corner may give him a second opportunity to lunge inside the McLaren driver and take the lead – something Norris will have to remain vigilant to.

Strategy

As it is likely to remain dry through the race, teams will be glad the reduced dry practice time has left them with more sets of slicks.

While last year’s race was impacted by rain on the opening lap, the first two races at the new Zandvoort in 2021 and 2022 were dry throughout. In both of them, Verstappen made use of all three dry compounds for at least one stint of the race – starting on the softs on both occasions before switching to the mediums for his second stint and then the hards for his final stint.

Pirelli expect that this year’s race will be different, however, and predict that a one-stop strategy will be the best approach to take to the race. Once again, fitting soft tyres for the start of the race is the recommended strategy, before moving onto hard tyres between laps 24 and 30 to go to the end.

Track position is especially important at Zandvoort, with limited overtaking opportunities outside of the main DRS straight on the pit straight making clear air a must. Should third-placed Oscar Piastri managed to get around Verstappen early on to make it a McLaren one-two, that strength in numbers could prove critical to McLaren.

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Overtaking

While there have been passes successfully pulled off at a variety of corners at Zandvoort over its first three grands prix back on the calendar, there is only one place where drivers will likely be looking at when it comes to lining up moves and that is in the main DRS zone along the pit straight.

A good exit out of the penultimate corner of turn 13 is critical to carry speed through the banked final corner before passing into along the pit straight. But just being in DRS range is not enough to guarantee a pass into the first corner, Tarzan.

In the last dry race her in 2022, Lewis Hamilton spent several laps early on unable to get around Carlos Sainz Jnr despite being well within a second for most of the first 13 laps of the race. Similarly, Sainz then managed to hold off Sergio Perez for lap after lap in the closing stages after getting by the Red Bull following a late Safety Car restart.

Getting by rivals early, whether at the start of the opening laps of a stint, will be a critical factor for all drivers.

Safety Cars

With narrow corners and not a large volume of run off to accompany them, any collision, incident or on-track stoppage at Zandvoort has the potential to trigger a Safety Car intervention. However, with the layout of the track lending itself to producing more single file racing, the risk of collisions is also slightly reduced as a result.

Out of the two dry races held at this circuit since its return to the calendar, one ran entirely without a Safety Car in 2021. There were two interventions in 2022, the first when Yuki Tsunoda’s AlphaTauri stopped on circuit, before the second when Valtteri Bottas stopped on the approach to Tarzan with a fuel system failure.

If there is a Safety Car on Sunday, it will be a rarity. There has not been a full Safety Car deployment since the Canadian Grand Prix in early June, with just a single lap under Virtual Safety Car since then, after Norris and Verstappen’s collision in Austria.

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One to watch

An obvious choice for who to watch out for back in the pack this weekend and it is the winner of two of the last three grands prix: Hamilton.

The Mercedes driver was feeling positive about his team’s prospects for the rest of the weekend after Friday practice, only to be eliminated from Q2 along with fellow surprise casualty Sainz. However, matters were made worse for Hamilton when he was hit with a three-place grid penalty for impeding Perez in Q1, meaning he will start down in 14th on the grid.

Mercedes’ race pace in recent rounds has been formidable. As well as George Russell towards the front of the field, it will be fascinating to see how much ground and how quickly Hamilton will be able to make up over the course of the race.

Over to you

Will Norris fend off Verstappen at the start and then over the rest of the race? Share your views on the Dutch Grand Prix in the comments.

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