The REAL Lando Norris has arrived | Ferrari-Mercedes team orders in Zandvoort | 2026 Dutch GP Review

**Soumil Arora** (0:00)
So good, so good, so good.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:01)
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**Soumil Arora** (0:30)
I swear to God, I have not seen this version of Lando Norris. This is just something else. He won this race firstly on his own, in spite of not being in the best of positions, in spite of having Kimi Antonelli pass him. He won it.
In the last stint, Lando Norris looked invincible. To the point that he was on his hard compound tires and Kimi on his softs, just could not do anything to touch him. Now, you have to ask the question as well, is it of course a situational thing? That the soft compound tires are just not good enough to make any dent to the hard compound tires throughout the race? Was it also a Mercedes track characteristic thing? And was it just not good enough this weekend overall? But you also have to put this thing out there, Kunal, that I don't think Lando Norris has ever looked this dominant in a Formula One race and he's won a World Championship.

**Kunal Shah** (1:17)
Yeah, and you know, we were brainstorming, this is a World Champions drive, but we also saw that in Hungary. But to me, this was a drive which you would literally look up to a shoe marker or in this case, Max Verstappen and it's of course, we're playing on the fact that Max had an opening lap crash and he was out of the race. So it was easy to be Max Verstappen because when Max Verstappen is on track, you can't be Max Verstappen, right? So but I'll put it this way.
One of the things I loved about Lando is that he wasn't battling Max. He wasn't battling Oscar. Two drivers he battled last year.

**Soumil Arora** (1:52)
Very surprising that Oscar was not even in the mix, by the way.

**Kunal Shah** (1:55)
And we'll get to that. But he was up against Lewis. He was up against Antonelli. He was up against Russell. And McLaren's upgrades brought the car to him. He used his talent to be in where he should be, which is pole position. He always said, I need to qualify higher up. And he got a pole for the Grand Prix. And then he made the strategy work in Zandvoort. And there are very interesting things on strategy as well. Soumil wish we should quickly get into. But yeah, all in all, what a drive. And where was, you know, there's some unlog Lando Norris has had this year, which I believe he didn't even have last year. Last year, he was just trying to hold on to his dear life and that World Championship title. And this year, he's saying, it is possible. I'm going to go for it and see where it lands. And that it is his World Championship defense, which he didn't have in Hungary.

**Soumil Arora** (2:46)
No, he didn't. He really was out of it. And now Lando Norris still isn't quite fully in the mix.
Let's actually pull up the points table and tell you what the situation looks like. And normally we tend to do this, but this time I was like, oh, well, I just need to focus on Lando and the win. But we do have the point standings. And Lando currently isn't fourth. He's ahead of Charles Leclerc at 159, four points ahead of Leclerc. So he's finally jumped him. To Hamilton, there is still a few points left.
Twenty-four points to Lewis Hamilton and to George Russell, who are now tied at 183 And Kimi is now, Kimi is all the way off. What's the gap now, 69 points? Kimi to George Russell, it's ludicrous. I honestly thought Kimi would have the race win in the bag. He looked on course for it. But very surprising that the Mercedes just did not look comfortable on the hard compound tires at all. And it just progressively was able to get worse, Kunal, as the race went on. I thought it would get better with a lighter fuel tank.

**Kunal Shah** (3:43)
Can you imagine that Mercedes, the most dominant chassis, power unit, even the driver package, if you consider Antonelli, struggled on that hard compound tire. And this actually points to what Toto Wolf has been saying. This is now a development war on upgrades. What are the upgrades McLaren brought in Hungary and in Zandvoort? Well, this is going to be a little detailed, but very crucial. In Hungary, they brought a lot of front of the car upgrades, and they supplemented that with a new rear wing and new engine cover in Zandvoort. And what are they trying to achieve? They're trying to achieve two things. First is aero efficiency. Of course, everyone wants an aero efficient car, so you're quick through all corner ranges. Right now, McLaren is the fastest in high-speed corners, medium-speed corners, but not really there with very, very slow-speed corners. So they're trying to correct that. The second Soumil is what we remember from last year about McLaren. They could bring the tires up to temperature fast, and then they had some magic in managing rear tire temperature. Yeah. Okay. And I believe that magic is what we saw back this weekend, because Mercedes, while they struggled on the hard tire, Lando Norris ran 50-plus laps out of 72 on that hard tire. And between the top three teams, there were lots of tire variations of tires that they had chosen as their prime race tire, which we'll also talk about when we get to Ferrari as well. But that's my reading that McLaren has brought this upgrade, they've made this step, and they were definitely the fastest racing car out there, but it didn't come easy, they still had to use strategy to make that win happen.