The dunes have never seen anything like it. For five years, Zandvoort’s banked corners and towering grandstands turned orange every August as hundreds of thousands of fans willed Max Verstappen to another home win. This time, the party was supposed to be a farewell. Instead, Zandvoort said goodbye to Formula 1 the way it said hello: with chaos, rain, a home hero in the wall, and a Brit lifting the trophy.
By the time the chequered flag fell on Sunday, August 23, Lando Norris had claimed his second consecutive victory, and denied an entire nation the ending it had scripted in its head.
Zandvoort’s farewell weekend didn’t wait until Sunday to get interesting. The Sprint format’s return brought two extra sessions of jeopardy. The paddock had already been buzzing before any engines were fired up as Verstappen’s future was dominating headlines after news broke of his new Red Bull deal, giving the weekend an added layer of sentiment before a single lap counted.
George Russell set the early tone, taking Sprint Qualifying pole ahead of Norris, while his Mercedes teammate Andrea Kimi Antonelli admitted to a mistake in that session that left his Mercedes battling floor damage. When the Sprint itself got underway on Saturday, it was Russell who converted pole into victory, but the story of the race belonged to Charles Leclerc, who produced one of the strongest drives of the weekend to scythe past Norris late on and finish second. It was an early hint that Ferrari, so often undone by a lack of raw pace on low-downforce, straight-heavy tracks, might have found genuine race-day speed on the twisting, banked layout on the coast of the Netherlands.
Slender margin
Saturday afternoon’s qualifying session for the Grand Prix itself was tighter still. As the first spots of rain began to fall, drivers scrambled back onto the circuit earlier than planned for their final runs. Antonelli briefly grabbed provisional pole before the reigning World champion snatched it back, and Russell then split the pair, finishing just over a tenth off the McLaren. Remarkably, only four hundredths of a second covered second, third and fourth on the timesheet. The width of a coat of paint separated the two Mercedes and Oscar Piastri.
Ferrari’s pair rounded out row three, unable to match the ultimate pace despite their evident race-day potential. Verstappen and Liam Lawson lined up on row four for Red Bull.
It was Norris’s second consecutive pole of the season and the 18th of his career and, tellingly, history was on his side. Every Dutch GP winner since Formula 1 returned to Zandvoort in 2021 had started from the front of the grid. Overtaking here is notoriously difficult; track position, everyone knew, would be everything.
If Zandvoort wanted a dramatic send-off, the weather obliged. Saturday’s track action had been run in the dry, but as Sunday approached, heavy rain swept in over the dunes. Drivers heading out for their reconnaissance laps found the circuit properly wet, some running through standing water, Lawson even sliding briefly through the gravel en route to the grid.
Then, as quickly as it had arrived, the deluge eased. With roughly 25 minutes to lights-out, the rain stopped, and just enough of the surface dried for every driver to gamble on slicks — albeit with damp patches still lurking in places. The FIA, wary of the conditions, sent the field around behind the Safety Car for the formation lap to assess grip before committing to a standing start, with the top four all rolling out on medium tyres.
Clean getaway
Norris made a clean getaway from pole, but it was Antonelli who produced the launch of the race, sweeping past Russell into second at Turn 1 while Ferrari’s starboy jumped Oscar Piastri off the line. Behind them, the two Red Bulls, Verstappen and Lawson, went wheel to wheel in a fight that felt, for a fleeting moment, like the Zandvoort of old.
Then it went wrong. On the sport’s biggest stage, on the day his home fans needed him most, Verstappen clipped the white line on the pit straight, lost the rear of his Red Bull, and speared into the wall at high speed. Debris scattered across the track. The red flags came out barely a lap into the final Dutch Grand Prix. Verstappen, shaken but unhurt, confirmed over the radio that he was okay, a small mercy for a crowd that had gone silent in an instant. Amid the chaos, Gabriel Bortoleto also spun through 360 degrees but somehow kept going, dropping to 18th while teammate Nico Hulkenberg swerved clear.
With the order reset to the end of Lap 1, the race resumed as a standing start, delayed further when Ollie Bearman’s Haas stopped on the way to the grid. When the lights finally went out again, Antonelli was imperious, sweeping past Norris to seize the lead. At the same time, Piastri pulled off a similarly bold move on Russell for third — dropping the Mercedes man straight into Leclerc’s crosshairs.
Lando Norris.
| Photo Credit:
AP
Mid-race chess match
What followed was a mid-race chess match. Antonelli eked his advantage over Norris out to over a second, denying the McLaren driver the use of his overtake-assist mode, while behind them Leclerc hunted down Russell and eventually got the move done. Norris, meanwhile, was blunt about his tyres over the radio: “I’m pace zero — I’ve got nothing else.” It didn’t sound like a man about to win.
As the first round of stops unfolded, hard tyres became the tool of choice, with slow stops for both Piastri and Antonelli costing crucial tenths. Hamilton, canny as ever, stayed out and inherited the lead, telling his engineer his tyres were “still okay” even as the pressure built. He eventually pitted on Lap 26, rejoining sixth.
The midfield had its own soap opera. A Gasly lock-up let Lindblad through, Hulkenberg picked off both, and Tsunoda muscled past the former in a scrappy multi-car scrap that would repeat itself in various forms all afternoon.
By the race’s halfway point, Antonelli still led the pack and Ferrari’s frustration was bubbling. Ordered to let Hamilton by, the Monegasque initially ignored the call before conceding a lap later, prompting a sarcastic radio message from his teammate: “Great waste of time there, guys.”
This is where the afternoon turned. Norris, seemingly out of answers a few laps earlier, found his rhythm again, chipping away at Antonelli’s lead. A second round of stops on Lap 48 briefly dropped him to third, over five seconds off the lead but with a seven-lap tyre offset. However, within three laps that gap was down to 1.4 seconds. By Lap 52, the Brit was all over Antonelli, who in his last race as a teenager pushed himself to his limits to keep the reigning world champion behind.
It didn’t matter, however, as Norris swept around the outside into Turn 1 to reclaim the lead and, moments later, picked off Hamilton too, completing a stunning double move that had the McLaren pit wall on its feet. A Virtual Safety Car, triggered by Esteban Ocon’s stricken Haas, briefly reshuffled the field as several cars dived for fresh soft tyres. When racing resumed with ten laps to go, Norris led Russell by 6.8 seconds, with Antonelli a further 5.6 seconds back after taking a cheap pit stop to go to the soft tyres.
Grandstand finish
With Antonelli closing on his own teammate, Mercedes made the call: Russell, unimpressed but compliant, let his younger teammate through on Lap 65, grumbling that the team may have “lost a double podium.” Hamilton had used the opportunity to close right onto Russell’s gearbox, setting up a grandstand finish for the final spot on the podium.
The chaos wasn’t quite finished. With three laps remaining, a coming-together between the two Williams of Carlos Sainz and Alex Albon triggered a second Virtual Safety Car, handing Russell a brief reprieve from Hamilton’s chase. Sainz was later penalised 10 seconds for causing the collision.
Out front, none of it touched Norris. He crossed the line 11.536 seconds clear of Antonelli to seal his second win in a row, with Russell just holding off Hamilton by a fraction of a second for third, and Leclerc completing the top five half a second further back.
“Amazing. A tough race,” Norris said afterwards. “Probably one of my better wins; we had to fight for it well, but the pace was strong… Nice to win the final race here in Zandvoort”
As Formula 1 fans look back on the last five years at this incredible circuit, a few moments immediately come to mind. It began in 2021, the fairytale return to the calendar after 36 years of exile, with their very own Flying Dutchman speeding past Valtteri Bottas to hand the Netherlands a home winner on its first weekend back on the F1 map. Verstappen followed up his win in 2021 with two more victories, each one turning the dunes into a sea of orange smoke, and each one cementing Zandvoort’s reputation as the most partisan crowd in the sport.
There was 2024, when Norris ended Verstappen’s unbeaten home record and, on crossing the line, borrowed his rival’s own catchphrase over team radio: “Simply lovely, huh?” a cheeky nod that became one of the season’s most talked-about moments.
Last year, it was yet again McLaren which crossed the chequered flag first; however, they had an Australian at the helm this time. Piastri delivered a complete masterclass that weekend — pole position, every lap led, fastest lap of the race — sealing his first career Grand Slam in the process.
Thank you, Zandvoort. For five years of orange smoke and banked corners, for turning a farewell tour into one last classic, and for never once making it easy right up to the final lap. Formula One will be back on many circuits in the years to come, but few will be missed quite like this one.
