Lando Norris said after his victory at the Dutch Grand Prix that it was “pretty stupid” to think about winning the world championship – but his dominant victory at the home track of championship leader Max Verstappen is causing concern for Red Bull.

Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko described Norris’ victory after the race as “alarming” – and made it clear that he was referring not only to the constructors’ championship, in which Red Bull was already clearly in trouble, but also to the drivers’ championship, in which Verstappen still has a huge lead of 70 points.

And Verstappen himself, who has not won since the Spanish Grand Prix five races ago in June, did not contradict this.

“This weekend was just a bad weekend overall,” said Verstappen. “So we have to understand that.”

“But the last few races haven’t really been fantastic. I think that was a bit worrying in a sense.”

“But we know we don’t have to panic. We’re just trying to improve the situation. And we’re working on that. But F1 is very complicated.”

Norris’ victory was the second-highest of the year in terms of the winner’s gap to his nearest rival. Only Verstappen’s victory in the season’s opening race in Bahrain, when he was 25 seconds clear of the first non-Red Bull, resulted in the winner crossing the finish line with a larger lead than the 22.9 seconds Norris had over the Dutchman.

It was the way the race started that was so impressive. Norris and McLaren somehow botched the start, not for the first time this year, and handed the lead to Verstappen.

But while this had previously – in Spain, Hungary and Belgium – ruined Norris’ chances of winning, it quickly became clear that this would not be the case in Zandvoort.

Norris clung to Verstappen like a limpet, overtaking him with ease before the first pit stops and then pulling away on the middle stretch. To add insult to injury to his rivals, he then set the fastest lap on the final lap of the race to secure an extra point.

This meant he gained eight points over Verstappen, not seven.

Significantly, this was both figuratively and literally just above the 7.8 points per race that Norris needed on average to catch up with Verstappen over the remaining ten races and win the title before arriving in the Netherlands.

Norris, however, did not let himself be carried away.

“I mean, I’ve been fighting for the championship since the first race of the year,” he said. “There’s no sudden decision that I have to do better now.”

“I’ve worked hard all year and I’m still 70 points behind Max, so it’s pretty stupid to think about anything at the moment.”

“I’m just going to take one race at a time and just carry on as I have been doing because there’s no point in thinking ahead and thinking about the rest. At the moment I’m not interested in that. So it’s not a question that needs to be asked to me every weekend.”

Another effective McLaren upgrade

However, it was hard not to see the potential significance of this win, with Norris admitting that McLaren already had the fastest car on average since the Miami Grand Prix in May, when he took his first win. This came after an upgrade that transformed the car from third fastest into a regular Red Bull competitor.

Since then, however, Norris has not managed to score another victory – and he admitted after his victory on Sunday: “We probably should have won two or three more races as a team, but we didn’t.”

The pressure to translate this form into victories grew and McLaren came to Zandvoort after the summer break with its first improvement in performance since Miami.

They downplayed it to some extent, saying it wasn’t as big as the one in Miami. About 30% of that size, it seemed. But it still seemed to make a significant difference.

Norris secured pole position on the second shortest track of the year with a breathtaking lead of 0.356 seconds.

In percentage terms, it was the biggest lead by a driver winning pole position since Verstappen’s lead in the fourth race of the season in China, and it came at a time when Red Bull seemed to be picking up where they left off in 2023 and looking ready for another dominant season.

And then came the race.

“We worked hard over the summer break to take a step back, refocus and then get going again,” Norris said. “So yeah, we had a great car. That was the first time since Miami that we bought some good upgrades to the car. They worked very well then. And now they’ve worked again.”

“But there is still a long way to go. So we have to keep working hard because this is just Zandvoort. Monza (next weekend) is a completely different track. So we will stay focused and keep working hard.”

“Something in the car made it more difficult”

The contrast with Red Bull was clear. Unlike McLaren, they had not had such great success with the reliability of upgrades.

In June, Mercedes technical director James Allison said in Canada that it looked to him as if an upgrade that Red Bull had introduced in Imola in May was actually a downgrade. Red Bull team boss Christian Horner rejected this claim.

And yet Verstappen used a version of the first floor design from that year at Zandvoort and none of the later changes. And teammate Sergio Perez used a later version.

It underlined the impression that Red Bull is struggling to improve its car this year.

Verstappen underlined this even further. After the race, he spoke of some “balance problems” with the car.

“It wasn’t the case in the first few races,” he said. “But yes, something in the car made it more difficult to drive. And it’s very difficult to say at the moment where that came from.”

“This of course harms our individual lap performance, but also our long run.”

Can McLaren do this everywhere?

McLaren team boss Andrea Stella stressed that he expects the team car to deliver a brilliant performance at Zandvoort as a race track.

He said the performance of each team seemed to be “very track dependent”.

“When we drive on these types of tracks, we can expect to have a strong performance, for example with high downforce and long corners,” said Stella.

“When we go to tracks with high-speed corners like Silverstone, we know that Red Bull is very strong on this type of track layout.

“And yet I believe they will be faster when we return to Austria, because in Austria they built up a lead of 0.4 seconds in qualifying.”

“But I think that thanks to the upgrades we would now be more competitive, even where Red Bull might be faster than us.”

McLaren starts still problematic

McLaren still has weaknesses, too. The loss at the start didn’t cost Norris anything this time; his pace was too high and he was able to make up for it. But his teammate Oscar Piastri was hurt.

Both McLarens got off to a bad start – and the Australian, who started the race in third place, lost out to George Russell’s Mercedes when Norris was overtaken by Verstappen. Piastri never really recovered.

Ferrari were able to overtake Charles Leclerc during the pit stops by stopping first. McLaren ran long and gave Piastri a tyre advantage. He overtook Russell without any problems and for a while Red Bull was worried that he might catch Verstappen – he had the pace. But he got stuck behind Leclerc and finished fourth.

McLaren knows they have a problem with the first laps. The problem is that every situation was different.

Norris, whose tires had simply spun too much this time, said: “We know what is needed for a perfect start. We are talking about small differences here.”

“Because neither of us understood it correctly, there may seem to be an underlying problem or something wasn’t as it should be or we clearly misjudged something more than the others.

“But Oscar is one of the best starters on the grid. I’m not as good as him, but I’m about as good. I’m not a bad starter, but obviously not as good as we need to be.

“It was another race where I almost slid off the line, but again today was different to everything else that has happened. So, as I said before the weekend, we need to find a bit more consistency, but we’ve been working on it and I think I’ve done better procedurally, but obviously it didn’t turn out right.”

More McLaren upgrades to follow

Overall, though, McLaren are starting to look impressive. It will take a few races to see if this upgrade has really made a big difference. But if Norris can keep winning, he has a real chance of making life difficult for Verstappen in a season that has seemed certain from a driver’s perspective for months.

When you add to that the fact that Piastri could also be in contention – he did win in Hungary, after all – and that Mercedes, which was not in form at Zandvoort for reasons it itself admitted it did not understand but won three of the four races before that, can also beat Verstappen, then the 70-point lead begins to look less enormous.

And after three races, Formula 1 returns to Singapore, where Red Bull struggled last year when they had their most dominant season ever, and where there is no reason to believe that it could not happen again.

Stella said: “In the Constructors’ Championship, the game was already on before this event. In the Drivers’ Championship, we definitely wanted to keep a cool head and focus on making it happen.”

“We think that the car in its current configuration may not deliver the performance needed to be the best car at every single event, so we plan to deliver more upgrades before the end of the season.”