Dutch GP conclusions: Piastri breaks Norris’s spirit, unavoidable Hadjar mistake, Hamilton’s realisation

McLaren driver Oscar Piastri claimed his seventh victory of the F1 2025 season in the Dutch Grand Prix at the Zandvoort circuit.

Piastri took a significant step towards a first F1 World Championship on a day McLaren team-mate Lando Norris retired with an engine issue, with Red Bull driver Max Verstappen second and Isack Hadjar third for Racing Bulls. Here are our conclusions from the Netherlands…

Don’t let Lando Norris’s bad luck overshadow a significant Oscar Piastri statement

Lando Norris had not yet climbed out of his smoking McLaren at Zandvoort when the inevitable comparisons began.

This, some would have you believe, was Lando’s Malaysia 2016 moment, a sudden engine failure set to deny him this year’s world championship.

A deficit of 34 points with nine races (and three sprints) still remaining – four more than Lewis Hamilton had to respond after his untimely DNF at Sepang nine years ago – is not exactly insurmountable.

Yet it would be foolish to pretend that this was not the way the wind was already blowing, for Oscar Piastri was already in the process of breaking his team-mate’s spirit long before the defining moment of the Dutch Grand Prix.

In truth, far from being a turning point, Norris’s bad luck only promises to accelerate the process of Piastri being crowned world champion for the first time in 2025.

Oscar Piastri vs Lando Norris: McLaren head-to-head scores for F1 2025

? F1 2025: Head-to-head qualifying statistics between team-mates

? F1 2025: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

After ending the first half of the season with three wins in four races, Zandvoort had promised to be a gentle reintroduction for Norris following the summer break.

It was here, after all, that Lando claimed what remains the most accomplished victory of his career in 2024, dominating from pole position to win by almost 23 seconds.

It was that confidence he carried into the early stages of this weekend, living up to his status as the overwhelming favourite for victory at this circuit.

Fastest in FP1. Fastest in FP2. Fastest in FP3. Fastest in Q2.

Easy. The pace oozing out of him, as so often when Norris is at his best.

Then came Q3. Then came the moment that mattered most. Then came the pressure.

And Lando? Second.

At the time he could least afford it. At a race he would surely have been targeting as a must win.

Norris handled the disappointment well, at least publicly, in the immediate aftermath of qualifying.

But being beaten to pole by Piastri here of all places, having been so comfortable last year and again in 2025 right up until those Q3 laps, was a punch to the gut.

That alone – before the events of Sunday – felt like an important moment in the title race, Norris being unable to shake Piastri off even when pretty much everything looked under control.

It has become a pattern of this season (think Jeddah, Canada, Spain): Norris starting the weekend as clearly the faster McLaren driver, Piastri gradually chipping away at the gap as each session passes.

Never quite closing it entirely, perhaps, but reducing it by just enough to allow Oscar to capitalise when Lando inevitably tenses up in the decisive moments.

And as we know, when Piastri gets ahead these days, there is no stopping him. All doubt has been eliminated – another sign of an emerging champion.

It is a trend reflective of the intrinsic differences between the McLaren drivers: Norris the naturally quicker one but with the suspect temperament; Piastri the quick learner, more resilient and possessing the intellect to study the data and apply the lessons to his own laps.

There is a danger that the sight of Norris sat mournfully on the grass on Sunday – his hands clasped together, his helmet still on – will ultimately be the image for which the 2025 season is remembered.

It would do a disservice to Piastri, and the strides he has taken this year, if this season were to be distilled down to a single moment.

He was already delivering a significant statement at Zandvoort – a giant sign to indicate where this title might be heading – before Norris’s engine went bang.

Isack Hadjar: Red Bull’s next ‘unavoidable mistake’?

When Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was appointed manager of Manchester United in 2019, a prominent pundit coined a phrase: “An unavoidable mistake.”

The argument went that there was little evidence from Solskjaer’s modest coaching career to suggest that he was equipped for one of the most coveted roles in sport.

Yet such was his impact during his stint as caretaker manager that any other decision by the board would have been an outrage.

It was a strategic error, one totally lacking in long-term vision. And with great predictability, the job soon proved to beyond Solskjaer’s own capabilities.

But his success in those early days had made him irreplaceable, leaving the club with no real option but to hire him on a permanent basis.

There has been a similar feeling watching the development of Isack Hadjar in 2025, pushing Red Bull into a decision it will likely regret, but one it will probably have to make anyway.

Having already outshone the princes of Mercedes and Ferrari in his debut season, his performance at Zandvoort – fourth on the grid despite missing FP2 with an engine issue, followed by his maiden podium finish after Lando Norris’s retirement – was his most impressive to date.

Assuming that Yuki Tsunoda is not long for this world with or without Honda, and with PlanetF1.com reporting this week that claims of an ambitious move for Alex Palou are wide of the mark, it seems increasingly inevitable that Hadjar will be promoted to Red Bull’s senior team for 2026.

Yet haven’t we been here a million times before?

A quick young talent fast-tracked to Red Bull, only to have the light taken from his eyes and his face rubbed into the mud by Max Verstappen?

It has long been established that being Verstappen’s team-mate is the hardest job in F1 and while the name of his team-mate might change on a regular basis, the struggle remains the same.

What should be the reward for a strong rookie season could so easily prove to be the start of Hadjar’s downfall.

Just look, for instance, at how differently Tsunoda is perceived now, after 13 punishing weekends as Verstappen’s team-mate, compared to the start of this season.

There is no reason to believe that Hadjar would be any more suited to the role than any other driver to have partnered Max this side of 2018.

And for all the progress he has made since the tears started flowing after his mistake on the formation lap in Australia, it doesn’t seem that long ago that Red Bull was hesitant about promoting Hadjar to F1 at all, let alone exposing him to the same environment as Verstappen.

There does, at least, appear to be some degree of hesitation this time, especially in light of the Liam Lawson disaster of early 2025.

Peter Bayer, the Racing Bulls chief executive, seemed to be only half-joking earlier this season when he quipped that he would “handcuff” Hadjar to stop Red Bull rushing him to the top team and that he should ideally remain where he is until at least the end of 2026.

“For heaven’s sake, don’t take this talent away from us too soon,” Bayer pleaded in June.

Yet what are the alternatives?

There are desperately few on this occasion. Mostly because Red Bull has already burned through them all.

This is another unavoidable mistake waiting to happen.

A glimpse of where Lewis Hamilton has been going wrong at Ferrari?

The root cause of Lewis Hamilton’s race-ending crash at Zandvoort?

His aversion, increasingly common among today’s F1 drivers, to walking the track.

If only Lewis had taken a stroll up to the banked Turn 3 on a wet Thursday afternoon and rubbed the sole of his shoe against the painted run-off area, he would have known to take a more cautious line at that section of track in the damp.

Yet because he belongs to the growing group of drivers who can no longer be bothered with a Thursday trackwalk – even Max Verstappen, rather disappointingly, recently joined their ranks – Hamilton left himself open to a nasty surprise 72 hours later.

After hitting rock bottom back in Hungary, this was a more… stabilising weekend for Hamilton, generally much closer to Charles Leclerc on pace.

The most instructive part of his weekend, though, came on Thursday – around the time he should have been walking the track – when he offered a little glimpse into where he has been going wrong at Ferrari.

With Fred Vasseur’s criticism of him over the summer break still ringing in his ears, Hamilton told media including PlanetF1.com of the need to reset and start enjoying himself, and his racing, once more.

Yes, he confessed, the first half of 2025 had been “not the most enjoyable” with all the pressure and all the noise proving “a lot” to deal with.

Probably one too many photoshoots, too, and not enough focus on “what’s really, really important.”

Ah. Finally.

But hold on: wasn’t this meant to be the whole point of Hamilton’s move to Ferrari in the first place?

Escaping the misery and underachievement of his final years with Mercedes?

Going back to basics? Returning to his roots? Dropping all the PR nonsense – the ‘activism’ too – and embracing life as a pure-and-simple racing driver once again?

Reuniting with Fred, a friendly face from the good ol’ GP2 days when all that mattered was the next race, and doing it all again, only this time on the grandest stage of all?

All this was the only way Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari was ever going to work out.

A change in outlook – a conscious decision to smile more over the last 10 races of this season – is not going to magically bring a breakthrough in his bond with his race engineer, solve the car’s ride-height woes or make him any more comfortable with the braking system.

Yet here was an admission that Hamilton’s priorities – starting with that photograph on his first day at Maranello back in January – have been in the wrong place up until this point of 2025.

Too much Brand Hamilton, in other words, and not enough Lewis Hamilton: Racing Driver.

It was a mistake for Mercedes to sign Andrea Kimi Antonelli

Not every driver can be a Max Verstappen.

Even if you really, really want him to be and cross all your fingers and your toes.

Saturday at Zandvoort marked a year since Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s first practice appearance with Mercedes at Monza last year, which, you’ll recall, ended after 10 minutes when he crashed at Parabolica.

As noted in PlanetF1.com’s conclusions from the Belgian Grand Prix, there was a sense earlier this season that accident was the best thing to ever happen to him.

For all the comparisons with a young Max, Monza 2024 was a flashing warning sign that the team could not wind Antonelli up and watch him go, like Red Bull did with Verstappen a decade ago, and that this was a talent that needed to be handled with care.

Hence, no doubt, the team’s very cautious, very methodical, very emotionally intelligent management of him in the early months of this season, rewarded with his maiden pole position at the Miami sprint, soon followed by his first podium finish in Canada.

A result of that nature would normally resemble ‘lift off’ and open the floodgates for a young driver.

Yet the way his season has nosedived so dramatically since, at the precise point his walk should have evolved into a run, should renew the debate over the team’s decision to sign him in the first place.

Would Antonelli’s crisis of confidence (just one point scored across the eight European-based rounds so far) be such a big talking point if he were, for instance, driving a Williams in 2025?

If Toto Wolff was much too cautious in insisting that George Russell spent three years at Williams across 2019-21, he has been at the opposite end of the spectrum in his plotting of Antonelli’s career path.

Mercedes, it appears, fatally underestimated the scrutiny that has come with having to live up to all those Verstappen comparisons and the challenge of replacing a driver of Lewis Hamilton’s stature.

The hope was that the summer break would be the great reset for his season.

Yet on the evidence of the Dutch Grand Prix, Antonelli remains the same driver – rash, uncertain, lost – he has been for some months now, his muddled thinking leading to him placing his front wing into gaps that quickly close.

An additional penalty for speeding in the pit lane, hot on the heels of his mindless collision with Charles Leclerc at Turn 3, only confirmed that he is no closer to regaining his early-season poise.

Whatever talent is there is being smothered by the pressure and excess expectation, piled upon his shoulders by those who should protect him most.

The result? He has become the definition of too much, too soon.

It is a mess almost entirely of Mercedes’ making. And it’s too late to back out of it now.

Lance Stroll can’t let the chance of a lifetime pass him by in F1 2026

Eddie Irvine came up with a good answer about perspective some years ago.

Yes, he admitted, it would have been nice to call himself a Formula 1 world champion.

But you know what?

He still gets to introduce himself at social functions today as someone who drove – and won races – for Ferrari.

Still sounds pretty bloody impressive by any measure, doesn’t it?

You could apply the same thinking to most drivers on the current grid.

Why does Lewis Hamilton still compete today beyond the age of 40 with seven titles and more than 100 wins to his name? Would one more championship really make such a difference to how he is remembered?

Likewise Fernando Alonso. Why does he still do it almost two decades after his last world championship? His place in history has long been assured, even if it is not as sizeable as he would like.

The same could be said of Max Verstappen, who has often remarked over the years that he would have been content with just one title, but still approaches each and every race as if chasing his first grand prix win.

The true difference between this trio, the only active world champions, and relative ‘underachievers’ like Irvine?

It transcends talent and ultimately comes down to such basic fundamentals as hunger, maintaining professional standards and – most crucially – never being satisfied. Call it competitive restlessness.

Which brings us to Lance Stroll.

Lance cares more than he is given credit for – since his debut season in 2017 he has worked regularly on his technique with the esteemed driver coach Rob Wilson – yet too often over the years he has given the impression of a driver who views his own sport with disdain.

You will likely have seen the clip of him looking as miserable as sin during the drivers’ parade at his home race in Montreal last year in a situation in which others would be lapping up the energy and warmth of the crowd.

And only this weekend, he walked out of a media session when a reporter was midway through asking a question.

That particular episode came shortly after he failed to record a lap in qualifying after a second accident in the space of 24 hours, leaving his mechanics with more repairs to do after a late night on Friday.

A seventh-place finish at the end of an otherwise wretched weekend represented a good recovery, yet owed much to Aston Martin’s decision to pit him for hard tyres early on when the rest were braced for rain.

As noted after last year’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, it is probably no coincidence that Stroll has never developed as hoped when he is so comfortable, with nobody to really challenge or hold him responsible, at Aston Martin.

Compare and contrast his outlook to the highly self-critical, occasionally overly apologetic nature of almost every other young driver – Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris immediately spring to mind – to have arrived in F1 over the last decade.

Lance spoke excitedly – no, seriously – about Adrian Newey’s influence on Aston Martin on Thursday, telling media including PlanetF1.com that “all the pieces of the puzzle [are] coming together” for the team ahead of 2026.

The car will be good. But what about the driver?

Will Lance do everything he possibly can to put himself in the best position to exploit its potential?

It’s time to get serious. If not, Stroll risks letting the chance of a lifetime pass him by.

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