McLaren’s Zandvoort Hat-Trick: Norris and Piastri’s Contrasting Dutch Grand Prix

Lando Norris won the final Dutch Grand Prix of this Formula 1 era at Zandvoort, completing a hat-trick of victories for McLaren following Piastri’s success in 2024 and Norris’s own the year after. It came from an extended second stint that undercut Kimi Antonelli and set up the pass that won the race. It’s back-to-back victories for Norris following Hungary, and confirmation the reigning World Champion is finding form at exactly the right moment. Piastri’s afternoon told a different story, a slow first stop and a Hard tyre that never switched on dropping him from promising early pace to a distant sixth.

Key Points: McLaren Dutch Grand Prix 2026 Debrief

• Norris wins for the second race running, completing a hat-trick of Dutch Grand Prix victories for McLaren following wins in 2024 and 2025
• The race-deciding move came from strategy: an extended second stint undercut Antonelli, and Norris passed him for the effective lead on Lap 53
• Norris struggled on softs early in the race but says the car came alive once the hards went on, forcing Mercedes into an early stop
• Piastri’s afternoon fell away after a slow 5.4-second stop on Lap 18 and a Hard compound he says never switched on through the second stint
• Stella credits the extended stint as the strategic call that beat Antonelli, and says Piastri’s P6 doesn’t reflect the pace he showed in his first and final stints

Norris’s Hat-Trick

Pole to victory again, and this time it came the hard way. Norris made a good getaway on a track still damp from a heavy shower before the formation lap, but the red flag for Verstappen’s crash reset the race, and Antonelli passed him for the lead at the restart. Norris had swapped from his starting mediums to softs during the stoppage, and by his own admission the car wasn’t working on them. He didn’t think a win was possible through the first half of the race.

The hard tyres changed that. Norris and Antonelli both pitted on Lap 21 and ran in close company through the next stint, Norris unable to find a way past. McLaren’s pit wall had an undercut planned for Lap 40, but Antonelli pitted first to cover it, so the team held Norris out for seven more laps instead, coming out six seconds behind with a fresher tyre delta to work with. He caught and passed Antonelli on Lap 53, and shortly after that got by a long-running Lewis Hamilton for the lead outright. A late Virtual Safety Car caused a brief scare, but Norris had built enough of a gap to win by 11 seconds.

The win is McLaren’s third straight at Zandvoort, following Piastri’s maiden victory in 2024 and Norris’s own first Dutch win in 2025, and it closes out this era of the race in the same way it closed the last one: with the reigning World Champion on top. Niki Lauda did the same for McLaren in 1985, the last time the Dutch Grand Prix left the calendar.

Piastri’s Missing Second Stint

Piastri’s race started well. He slipped to fifth in the early scrap for position but recovered to third at the restart, and the pace through the opening stint was promising enough that McLaren tried to protect track position with an early stop on Lap 18, guarding against a George Russell undercut. The stop itself was slow, 5.4 seconds, and it dropped Piastri out behind Russell and then both Ferraris, down to sixth. He never really found his way back from there.

Piastri points to pace as the real issue from his second stint onwards. The pit stop cost him track position, but the bigger loss came from the car itself once the second set of tyres went on. Switching back to soft tyres late in the race, prompted by a Lap 55 Virtual Safety Car, brought some of it back, but by then the race had moved on without him.

Stella on the Strategy Call

Team Principal Andrea Stella went straight to the extended second stint as the call that won the race, crediting the drivers and engineers for finding the extra race pace the team needed after a difficult Sprint. He was direct that Norris drove like the champion he is, capitalising on what the car and tyres gave him through difficult conditions. On Piastri, Stella’s read was that P6 undersold the pace on show, pointing to the pit stop and the second-stint tyre switch-on issue as the two factors that cost him positions, and noting the first and final stints were more representative of where the car actually was.

McLaren’s F1 programme moves straight on to a Pirelli tyre test at Mugello, Piastri driving Wednesday and Norris Thursday, ahead of Monza.

Coffee Corner Take

Norris’s win at Zandvoort echoes Hungary. He didn’t have the pace on softs and said so afterwards without dressing it up. Then the tyres came good and he did the rest himself, patient early, holding his nerve through an extended stint that could easily have looked like the wrong call if Antonelli hadn’t pitted first.

A slow stop and a tyre that never came in cost Piastri just as many positions as Hungary’s gearbox failure did, but it’s a different kind of problem, and arguably a more fixable one. Stella’s insistence that P6 undersold the pace is worth taking seriously given how the first and final stints looked, but two race weekends running now where one half of the garage delivers cleanly and the other loses the result to something that isn’t outright pace is a pattern worth watching heading towards Monza.

Norris has two wins in two, and McLaren have their hat-trick. This era of the Dutch Grand Prix has signed off exactly the way the last one did: with McLaren’s reigning World Champion on top of the podium. The championship fight is still Mercedes’ to lose, but McLaren leave Zandvoort with genuine momentum behind them and a driver who looks increasingly comfortable carrying it.