The 2026 Formula 1 championship finds itself at a curious intersection where nobody is willing to entertain the idea that they have the best car.

Championship leader Kimi Antonelli said after finishing second to Lando Norris in the Dutch Grand Prix that Mercedes no longer has the best car – indeed, that it may only be the third best.

But Norris, now fourth in the standings with 159 points to Antonelli’s 242, was determined to play down talk of him staging a comeback in the final half of the season, despite winning two consecutive grands prix. “I don’t have the car I need to fight for a championship,” he said after his Dutch GP victory.

Many readers would be tempted to cite the so-called Mandy Rice-Davies principle – “Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

What’s clear, though, is that under the latest technical regulations there is still a difference in relative strengths between cars which complicates the competitive picture. In broad-brush terms the McLaren MCL40 thrives in fast corners, Ferrari’s SF-26 is strong in terms of carrying good speed into slow corners, while the Mercedes W17 is somewhere between the two. That makes the competitive balance heavily dependent on circuit layout.

Norris’s contention is that his car is insufficiently rounded to be dominant across the remaining rounds in the way last year’s McLaren was the car to beat at most tracks.

Norris played down the significance of his Dutch GP victory

Photo by: Alastair Staley / LAT Images via Getty Images

“We have a strong car in certain areas,” he said. “It’s not like last year where we were pretty good everywhere. We’re very, very strong in high speed. The place we’ve improved the car the most is high-speed performance.

“No one matches us in high speed. And that’s a good thing. My pace advantage to Mercedes in Turn 7, Turn 8 was crazy.

“But their advantage that they have to us in slow speed is also crazy. And therefore I don’t have the confidence to say, yeah, I can easily fight for a championship for the rest of the season. I know I’ve just won two races in a row and two poles in a row, but at the minute I don’t have the car I need to fight for a championship.

“And I know that’s quite a big comment, but I think last year I understood what is needed from a car and what was needed from me. And I know the level that I am now and what I can perform at. And I know just what I need from the car – and what tracks we have coming up where we’re going to certainly struggle more.”

The issue is more complex than simply saying a particular car is fast around a certain type of corner. This year’s cars are shorter, narrower and slightly lighter – and the chassis characteristics are more interconnected with power unit performance than ever before, given the influence of corner-entry speeds on energy harvesting.

McLaren’s decision to run a short wheelbase, helping it save weight at the start of the season, has baked in certain shortcomings in terms of how much aerodynamic load the team can squeeze from the floor.

Performance is often hugely variable between tyre compounds. In Saturday’s sprint race, running mediums, Norris struggled with rear degradation and was overtaken by Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc in the closing stages. In the grand prix he took the restart on used softs, was passed by Antonelli at the start, and didn’t really get into the race until the hard-compound tyres went on.

Norris was able to pressure championship leader Antonelli later in the Zandvoort race

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“We put on the hard tyres,” he said. “We were a bit more aggressive with how we wanted to approach the stint. And we turned things around. I had that feeling in the car that I wanted. I went from just not feeling like I was going to win a race to at least we can force him [Antonelli] to make mistakes.

“When I get what I need from a car, when I have the front I want, when I get the confidence with the rear on entries – just when I get what I need to be able to know and predict every single corner, I’m going to win a race.”

Norris has a driving style slightly more aligned to Max Verstappen than the likes of George Russell or even his own team-mate, Oscar Piastri. Rather than separating the throttle off/brake on and turning phases, he likes to blend the throttle and brakes and take a shallower approach angle. Essentially he is feeling for the point in the overlap where the front tyres begin to exert more lateral grip, which helps rotate the car and carry more speed into the corner, towards the apex.

This requires the car not only to have a ‘strong’ front end, but also to communicate what the front tyres are doing, which represents a tough engineering challenge. Modern F1 cars require a consistent ride height for the aerodynamics to function optimally, so the suspension geometry is designed to minimise dive and squat. A side of this is that it saps driver ‘feel’.

Some can live with that, some can’t, which is why McLaren designed an alternate front suspension geometry with a revised kingpin angle for Norris when he was floundering at the beginning of last season. Once he has that feel he can be very adaptable in terms of his lines and the degree of overlap between throttle and brake, which is why he thrives in low-grip conditions.

But although he has a huge amount of adaptability within this range, he still needs that strong front end, good transmission of feel, and confidence that the rear axle will rotate predictably on cue.

“It’s clear where our weaknesses are,” Norris concluded. “Therefore we need to attack those things. And until we do that, it’s still going to be a very tough end of the season.”

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The opening stages of the Formula 1 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort descended into chaos after rain had started to fall during the grid procedure.

Max Verstappen crashed heavily on the exit of the final corner on the opening lap of the race. The Red Bull driver admitted that it was entirely his own mistake. The Dutchman thought he could get back on the throttle, but that part of the track was clearly still too wet.

Behind Verstappen, Gabriel Bortoleto also came close to crashing, although he miraculously managed to keep his Audi out of the wall, while it was even more remarkable that team-mate Nico Hulkenberg managed to avoid him.

The German immediately said over the radio that he feared he was going to T-bone Bortoleto.

“It was just that corner, if I’m very honest with you. It was full wets, that place. I think that’s why Max lost it and it was the same for me,” Bortoleto said in the media pen post-race.

“I was on the downside of the banking. I did a little reaction move to the left, I think, when I saw big smoke coming up ahead. And when I did that, I just went as well.”

According to Gasly, F1 drivers would have been able to get their tyres up to temperature more effectively if the formation lap had been completed without the safety car

Photo by: Clive Rose / Getty Images

Would a normal formation lap have been better?

According to the drivers, the rest of the track had already dried by that point, meaning it was simply a matter of surviving the final two corners. Starting on slicks therefore made sense, as did the FIA’s decision to opt for a standing start.

That said, several drivers were critical of how the start procedure was carried out at Zandvoort.

“If we would go the way we did with one lap behind the safety car and a standing start, then I would have preferred to just do a normal out-lap, so we would have pushed a bit faster,” Pierre Gasly said when asked by Motorsport.com.

“I thought the point was to go at least once through the last corner and the banking with the safety car before doing the normal race start. And yeah, it was damp.”

According to the Alpine driver, the FIA would have been better off choosing between two conventional options: a rolling start behind the safety car or a standing start with a normal formation lap.

“I’m sure we’ll review at the next race what the drivers’ feedback was,” Gasly continued. “But I think it was either no safety car and only one formation lap or with the safety car at least giving us one extra lap.”

Red Bull stand-in Liam Lawson shared that view and added that he already knew before the start that the procedure would lead to chaos.

Lawson emphasises that he deliberately left more margin than his team-mate Verstappen in the final corner

Photo by: Anni Graf – Formula 1 via Getty Images

“I don’t know why we had the safety car. To do a standing start and also do a lap behind the safety car makes no sense,” Lawson said when asked by Motorsport.com.

“I’m not sure what the reasoning of that was, but I feel like we could all see that coming. We were all probably saying the same thing before when we got the news, but we didn’t have control over that.”

FIA explains reasoning behind safety car formation lap

When asked by Motorsport.com, the FIA clarified that it acted on the information available at the time.

The race director first sent the medical car out for a reconnaissance lap, something an FIA spokesperson said does not normally happen.

The feedback from the medical car was that there was still standing water at Turns 2 and 3, with Turn 3 – the Hugenholtz corner – also being the first banked corner on the circuit. Based on that information, the FIA considered it safer to complete the formation lap behind the safety car.

The intention at that point was to have a standing start, but by completing the formation lap behind the safety car, race control kept both options open. If the standing water had been deemed too dangerous, it could still have opted for a rolling start.

Williams driver Carlos Sainz, however, felt the latter would not have been a solution and would not have prevented the chaos in the final corner.

Carlos Sainz, Williams

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“I think, given it was towards the end of the lap, a non-standing start, a rolling start, would have ended up in the same result, because by that time we were all one by one,” Sainz said. “So I don’t think it would have changed much. It’s an unfortunate situation with a lot of water in only one corner.”

It therefore came down to the drivers’ own judgement, with Lawson stressing that he deliberately left more margin – considerably more than Verstappen, who was running ahead of him.

“It was just impossible. The whole first half of the lap was dry and then the last few corners were completely soaked. So, it was really easy to do that [what Max has done] when you have this much power on a slick tyre,” he said.

“I really lifted out of it because honestly I had no confidence in how much grip we were going to have there and I think Max was probably trying to get closer and make an overtake, and just lost it.”

Verstappen himself, however, did not want to blame any external factors and stressed that he had simply made a mistake.

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Lewis Hamilton has urged Ferrari to be more like Mercedes with its efficiency after growing frustrated by a lack of team orders during the Formula 1 Dutch Grand Prix.

The Ferrari driver finished fourth in an action-packed contest at Zandvoort on Sunday, with his mid-race battle with stablemate Charles Leclerc arguably being Hamilton’s defining period.

Hamilton had just overtaken McLaren’s Oscar Piastri for fifth on lap 35 and was right behind a much slower Leclerc, so was therefore angling for team orders but they did not arrive.

“Great way of wasting time guys, good job,” complained a sarcastic Hamilton, who eventually took fourth when Leclerc pitted on lap 43 to end a very drawn-out process.

That is compared to Mercedes which swapped its cars with seven laps remaining, as George Russell gave second to Kimi Antonelli, who had fresher tyres so could attack Lando Norris.

Although the McLaren driver still took victory, it was a decision both Antonelli and Russell agreed with as they completed the podium ahead of Hamilton and fifth-placed Leclerc.

“I want to win,” Hamilton told F1 TV. “I want to win. I’m here to win and it is difficult when you’re looking ahead and you see the two Mercedes drivers, they get the call and it’s done – they execute straight away.

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari

Photo by: Clive Rose / Formula 1 via Getty Images

“They let Kimi by and let him get on with the race. I was on a different strategy. It’s not the same here and that’s a little bit difficult, but we just have to take it.

“We’ll take it offline, and when I go back now, I’ll speak to them about it.”

Russell did well to take third though, as he feared that Mercedes had “lost a double podium”, because by letting Antonelli by, it put him under instant pressure from Hamilton.

The Mercedes driver held firm though, helped by the lap 70 virtual safety car for debris at Turn 5, and Hamilton reckons the earlier fiasco harmed his chances of overtaking his former team-mate.

When asked by Motorsport.com if the VSC stopped him from getting a podium, the seven-time world champion replied: “It felt like it was the closest opportunity I had.

“I think I’d come out of [Turn] 14 pretty close to him and I was just opening SM [Straight Line Mode] and just getting on the boost.

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes, George Russell, Mercedes

Photo by: Michael Potts / LAT Images via Getty Images

“I don’t know whether or not we would have got by because the Mercedes is just so quick. You saw the McLaren fly past just on power. We’re losing like four tenths of a lap here just on straight lines.

“So that was a challenge, but I do think the time was lost when I was behind Charles, which ultimately meant I had a bigger distance to cover to try and catch up with George at the end.”

The result leaves Hamilton tied with Russell in second and 59 points behind Antonelli with 11 rounds remaining, a run where the Ferrari driver is hoping to add to his Barcelona victory.

But to do so Hamilton thinks the Italian marque must reduce its engine power deficit to Mercedes, despite various chassis upgrades it brought to the Netherlands.

“The one thing I’m definitely really proud of the team, they brought an upgrade here this weekend,” the 41-year-old added.

“We are getting closer to them but half the season we’ve been down in power. We really need to pick up the power if we’re going to be anywhere near trying to fight for them and closing the gap to them.”

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