2024 Dutch GP
Results
Race
George Russell
1:13.927 Fastest Lap
72 Laps
7th
Lewis Hamilton
1:13.878 Fastest Lap
72 Laps
8th
Qualifying
George Russell
1:10.244 Fastest Lap
18 Laps
4th
Lewis Hamilton
1:10.948 Fastest Lap
13 Laps
12th
Formula 1 returned from the summer break with the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort.
After a difficult qualifying session, George and Lewis started the 15th race of the season from P4 and P14 on the challenging old school circuit on the Dutch North Sea coast.
The team had a disappointing start to the second half of the season. George was in a podium position in the early stages of the race, but was beaten by Charles Leclerc and Oscar Piastri as the race progressed. He eventually crossed the line in P7. Lewis made a strong recovery from P14, making up six positions to finish in P8.
After changeable conditions with strong gusts of wind and rain on Friday and Saturday, the race took place in dry conditions. The track temperature hovered around 27 degrees, but the wind was still very strong.
George and Lewis each had a new set of Hard tyres and a new set of Medium tyres for the race. Lewis also had two extra sets of new Soft tyres.
By comparison, McLaren had two new sets of Medium tyres and one new set of Hard tyres, while Max Verstappen had two new sets of Hard tyres and one new set of Medium tyres.
The top 10 all opted to start on the Mediums, including George in P4. Lewis, however, started on the Soft tyres.
Our duo made up one position each at the start: George passed Oscar Piastri to move up to P3, Lewis moved up to P13 and a little later overtook Yuki Tsunoda at Turn 11 to move up to P12.
George held P3 in the early stages of the race, closely followed by Piastri, Charles Leclerc and Sergio Perez. Lewis, for his part, was stuck in a DRS train led by Pierre Gasly in P7.
However, after 10 laps Lewis managed to overtake Nico Hülkenberg with the help of DRS to secure P11. Next, he caught Lance Stroll in Turn 1, who had fallen out of the DRS window of his team-mate Fernando Alonso, who Lewis passed next to take P9.
Meanwhile, George was able to get out of Piastri's DRS window and keep the gap to Lando Norris in P2 at 3.5 seconds.
On lap 18, Norris passed Max Verstappen to take the lead. At that point, George was 4.3 seconds behind Verstappen and 1.6 seconds ahead of Piastri in P4.
In the following laps the gap to the leading duo grew to over 5 seconds, leaving George in a battle with Piastri and Leclerc for the remaining podium place.
Lewis, meanwhile, was unable to overtake Gasly and made his first stop on lap 24. He switched from the Soft to the Hard tyres and returned to the track in P16.
Two laps later, George came in for his stop to change from Medium to Hard. He fell behind Leclerc, who made a successful undercut to take P3.
Piastri returned to the track four seconds behind George after his stop and continued to close the gap lap after lap. He caught George on lap 40 and took P5. Lewis was P8 at the time, behind Perez and Sainz.
Lewis pitted for the second time on lap 49. His gap to Hülkenberg was large enough to warrant another stop and a fresh set of Soft tyres. A few laps earlier, he had reported a lock up. On the new set of tyres, Lewis immediately set the fastest lap of the race.
Six laps after Lewis, George also came in for his second stop. He was approaching several lapped cars and Sainz had reduced the gap to less than a second. On the Soft tyres George began to chase the Spaniard, but was unable to catch him in time to challenge him for P6.
George and Lewis eventually crossed the line in 7th and 8th place after 72 laps. The race was won by Lando Norris ahead of Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc. Norris also steals the fastest lap point from Lewis on the final lap of the race.
The team will now analyse this weekend's data and prepare for the next race, which is only a few days away.
From the North Sea coast at Zandvoort it's straight on to Monza. The Italian Grand Prix will be held at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza next weekend.
George Russell
Today’s race was an odd one. We didn’t have the pace and that was the case on all three tyre compounds. It felt that I was sliding around quite a lot, suffering from high degradation, and slowly went backwards. We will have to understand why that was as we were relatively quick on Saturday. Performance does swing circuit to circuit, but we have been up near the front in the past six races. I am therefore confident that this is an outlier.
We will get to work immediately to understand why we were slower than our competitors today. We have another race next weekend in Monza and we will aim to put in a much better showing there.
Lewis Hamilton
We knew today was all about damage limitation. We managed to work our way back into the points but ultimately, we didn’t have the pace to fight for much more today. If we had qualified better yesterday, than it may have been a little different. I enjoyed getting past several cars though and putting the Soft tyre to use in that opening stint. It felt good to move forwards but I’m a little disappointed as if we had a better Saturday, then the fight would have been for more points.
Strategy wise, we were looking at running to the end on the one-stop. I had a lock-up on the Hard tyre though and that meant we switched to the two-stop. It was a shame to lose the point for fastest lap at the end, but I should have put in a quicker effort earlier on.
Toto Wolff, Team Principal & CEO
We had a bad race today. It was quite a contrast to the previous Grand Prix in Spa where we had set the pace and finished first and second on track. We clearly got some decisions wrong in terms of how we were running the car here. We will evaluate that quickly so we can avoid another race like this. It is bruising. Sometimes it is good to be bruised though to take a step forward.
With George, we switched to a two-stop strategy as he was running out of tyre in his second stint. That higher degradation was likely in part due to some set-up decisions we took. We will need to do a full analysis to understand how much of it was down to that or other factors. With Lewis, we planned a two-stop race for him, although we were evaluating the one-stop midway through. However, he suffered a lock up on the Hard tyre and, with no risk behind, we switched him onto the two-stop strategy. His pace was good throughout though and that gives us encouragement. There is clearly lots of learning we can take from this weekend and hopefully we can bounce back next weekend in Monza.
Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director
Overall, it has been a poor weekend. We will go away and pick through the data to understand why we were off the pace both in qualifying and race trim. Today we were lacking the speed to fight for much more than we achieved. We were not generating good grip and, consequently, were sliding around on the tyre. That led to higher degradation than our competitors and forced us into a two-stop race. We were on the back foot today, but we will be working hard to ensure that isn't the case next weekend in Monza.
2024 Dutch GP Result
1 | Lando Norris | McLaren | |
2 | Max Verstappen | Red Bull | +22.896 |
3 | Charles Leclerc | Ferrari | +25.439 |
4 | Oscar Piastri | McLaren | +27.337 |
5 | Carlos Sainz | Ferrari | +32.137 |
6 | Sergio Pérez | Red Bull | +39.542 |
7 | George Russell | Mercedes-AMG | +44.617 |
8 | Lewis Hamilton | Mercedes-AMG | +49.599 |
9 | Pierre Gasly | Alpine | +1 Lap |
10 | Fernando Alonso | Aston Martin | +1 Lap |
11 | Nico Hülkenberg | Haas | +1 Lap |
12 | Daniel Ricciardo | Racing Bulls | +1 Lap |
13 | Lance Stroll | Aston Martin | +1 Lap |
14 | Alexander Albon | Williams | +1 Lap |
15 | Esteban Ocon | Alpine | +1 Lap |
16 | Logan Sargeant | Williams | +1 Lap |
17 | Yuki Tsunoda | Racing Bulls | +1 Lap |
18 | Kevin Magnussen | Haas | +1 Lap |
19 | Valtteri Bottas | Sauber | +2 Laps |
20 | Zhou Guanyu | Sauber | +2 Laps |