Failure to address the RB20’s weaknesses and the wrong car setup saw Dutch F1 driver Max Verstappen finish nearly 23 seconds behind Lando Norris.
The McLaren driver finished 22.896 seconds ahead of Verstappen after completing 72 laps at Zaandvort on August 25, marking the biggest gap between the two men in an F1 race this season. It was a shocking result considering Verstappen had been ahead of Norris for nearly 20 laps, and meant the Red Bull driver missed out on victory at the Dutch Grand Prix for the first time since Zandvoort returned to the F1 calendar in 2021.
After the race, Norris praised the MCL38’s speed. “The car was incredibly fast, always giving me the ability to accelerate when I needed to… I saw the gap early on, because Max couldn’t accelerate. As time went on, we got faster and faster. It was clear from lap six or seven, something like that,” said the Briton.
McLaren boss Andrea Stella agreed with Norris and saw a clear lead from around lap 15. “Once the gap became clear, we no longer had to worry about being overtaken by our rivals because it was easily solved with an overtake on the track,” he said.
Norris’s overtake on Verstappen on lap 18 was made even easier than usual, with Red Bull using the downforce-biased rear wing setup they used at Monaco on the Dutchman’s car. Verstappen was therefore easily attacked soon after Norris took advantage of his rival’s rapid tyre degradation to close the gap and put the RB20 in the DRS wing area.
Immediately after this overtake, Norris’s race engineer, Will Joseph, radioed: “We think Red Bull might try to jump back. But that’s OK.” McLaren was confident that the MCL38’s speed would help them escape and create a safe gap, not giving Verstappen a chance to counterattack. In fact, from then on, the defending champions could only focus on holding on to second place.
The MCL38’s power was evident early on when McLaren upgraded the car at the Miami Grand Prix earlier this summer, and the British team has since steadily overtaken its rivals and put a stop to Red Bull’s dominance.
Verstappen was critical of the RB20’s pace from the start of the Dutch Grand Prix. “It’s been like that all weekend. It’s pretty much the same from FP1 to the race. The limitations are the same, and it’s difficult to deal with them now. It seems we’re too slow, and the tyre wear is bad,” he said.
The Dutchman said Red Bull’s current handling of the sluggishness was strange compared to the past few years. “There is something wrong with the car that we have to understand, and of course we have to improve quickly,” Verstappen added.
In reality, Red Bull is still struggling to solve the problem on the RB20. The Austrian team admitted that they are setting up their two drivers with two separate designs to solve the problem for the RB20. With McLaren’s recent progress, Red Bull was worried and started using a car setup that focuses on tire conservation to counter McLaren’s superior speed. However, in reality at Zandvoort, tire wear was not as great as Red Bull expected. By the last lap, Norris was still strong enough to set a fastest-lap to earn 1 more point.
According to CEO Christian Horner, Red Bull made a mistake in setting up Verstappen’s car. “We took a gamble because we thought the tyre wear would be quite high, so we increased the downforce to the maximum. I think in retrospect that was probably not the best choice,” he said.
He also admitted that the tyre wear was actually low and left Verstappen’s RB20 lacking straight-line speed, while the other Red Bull driver, Sergio Perez, was more comfortable in the second half of the race with a different setup that favoured speed.