Formula 1’s frantic return from the mid-season break continues apace, with the circus moving from Belgium to the Netherlands for round 15 of the championship.
Just three hours northwest of Spa-Francorchamps is Circuit Zandvoort, a renovating historical circuit nestled in the sand dunes of the beach on which it’s built.
But the relative lack of distance belies the difference between these two track and the challenge — and possible change to the competitive order — it generates.
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Zandvoort is more of a rollercoaster than a racetrack. It’s undulating, bumpy and crammed with ambitious levels of camber such that there’s no mistaking it for any other track.
Is that good or bad for the purposes of the battle at the front? Though the title fight is as good as finished, the closeness of the fight for victory early in the season was intoxicating, and the sport is hoping the variety of circuits coming up might rekindle some of that excitement.
WILL RED BULL RACING DOMINATE THE REST OF THE CALENDAR?
Okay, so we’re unlikely to get a fulsome answer to this question his weekend, but given Zandvoort is a dramatically different circuit to Spa-Francorchamps, it will greatly broaden the sport’s sample size.
Zandvoort is around two-thirds the length of Spa and all about downforce performance rather than efficiency or straight-line speed. It’s also a track that rewards momentum and rhythm rather than just traction and exit speed.
It’s best known for its steep banking, particularly through the first, third and 14th turns — the latter two banked more steeply than the Indianapolis Motor Speedway — which adds an extra dimension to the challenge both for the driver and technically. Last season Mercedes appeared to struggle with oil pressure problems because of the unusual forced being applied to the car through the rollercoaster bends.
All that said, there are a few similarities.
Despite being newly resurfaced as part of its F1-ready renovations, the circuit is still bumpy, and that banking generates compression in a similar style to Eau Rouge.
That’s important to note given the current working theory about the ominous gap in performance between Red Bull Racing and Ferrari in Belgium was to do with ride height. The question is: were ride heights raised due to the track or due to the FIA’s technical directive regarding floor stiffness?
We might begin to glimpse the answer in Zandvoort. Let’s hope for the sake of the last eight races of a foregone championship that the two frontrunners can at least stay close.
CAN CARS KEEP OUT OF THE GRAVEL?
Part of the challenge of Zandvoort is the narrowness of the circuit allied with the ubiquity of the adjacent gravel. This is a proper old-school circuit that gives no quarter when you dip a wheel off line, in quite the contrast to many other new or newly returned circuits.
But it was a major problem last year, particularly as teams and drivers attempted to learn their way around the layout. Drivers would exceed the limit, find themselves in the gravel and then become beached or spray stones over the track as they rejoined.
F1 alone featured six red flags, some of them extremely lengthy, from the start of practice through to the end of qualifying. The support categories also featured many more disruptions.
To address the issues, the race organisers have implemented a kind of sealed fake gravel, notably at turn 12, to try to avoid at least the problem of driver kicking rocks onto the track.
Around a metre on the inside of that corner has been sealed in a resin-like compound. Though it’s hard like tarmac, it’s also slippery, meaning drivers will be punished for leaning on it — distinctly different from the likes of asphalt run-off.
It won’t prevent drivers from losing control and finding themselves lost in the stones, but it will prevent to sorts of clumsy stoppages derived only from a dirty track.
WILL AN EXTENDED DRS ZONE IMPROVE THE ACTION?
One of last year’s major talking points was the addition and then removal of a DRS activation zone through the final corner, the banked Arie Luyendyk Bocht, which leads at full speed onto the short front straight measuring around 1.2 kilometres.
The Zandvoort track map betrays the fact it’s always been unlikely to provide much overtaking given its narrowness and aero-dependent layout, which is why the FIA originally homologated it with a DRS zone starting in the banked corner.
However, race control shortened it during the weekend to exclude that bend due to safety concerns — the governing body was worried that cars were too much on the edge given the dynamics of the turn to handle suddenly dumping a mass of downforce without losing control.
The 2022 generation of cars is different, however. They’re much more loaded at speed and generate far more of their aerodynamic performance from the floor rather than the rear wing or bodywork, meaning opening the DRS is less likely to cause a sudden aerodynamic catastrophe.
Thus the FIA has decided to trial an extended DRS zone incorporating the final corner during FP1, with team and driver feedback then contributing to the decision to continue using the system for the rest of the weekend.
The 2021 Dutch Grand Prix featured just 23 overtakes, most of which were made into the first corner. The hope is that the cars will prove stable enough through the final corner to handle the addition of the overtaking aid from there and down to the lap’s first braking zone.
It may not be the silver bullet hoped for, however. While following and racing is generally better with this generation of machinery, several drivers have noted that slipstreaming in particular as well as DRS have become less effective overtaking tools given less of the aero work is being done by the bodywork.
So while the DRS might this year be appropriate for that rapid final bend, it may leave us only back where we started last season anyway.
CAN MICK SCHUMACHER MAKE THE MOST OF HIS REMAINING TIME?
The 2023 silly season is absolutely in full swing, with a handful of midfield seats enough to send the driver market into overdrive.
But while Daniel Ricciardo and Oscar Piastri steal headlines, Mick Schumacher is in a somewhat understated fight for his F1 life.
The son of seven-time champion Michael Schumacher has endured a rocky start to his life as a Formula 1 driver. He debut last season in what was the field’s worst car alongside the field’s most controversial modern-day driver, Nikita Mazepin. He toiled with the American team all season, but a lack of competitiveness from the car meant he was never able to score points.
But a lacklustre 2021 was part of the plan — to a degree, anyway. The team was putting all its eggs in the 2022 basket, and the VF-22[ has turned out to be the machine to take Haas back into midfield respectability, at least on most weekends.
The car has scored 34 points so far this year, but inescapable is that Kevin Magnussen has scored 22 of them despite having sat out a year from F1 last year.
Schumacher’s 12 points aren’t to be sniffed at, but that modest total was accrued exclusively at the British and Austrian grands prix, before which he’d never scored points and after which he’s failed to finish higher than 15h.
It’s why the paddock believes Schumacher is on the way out of the sport at the end of the season.
Already there are reports that Mick will be dumped by the Ferrari junior driver academy — fair enough too given Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz are positioned as long-term Ferrari drives, thus negating the need for another coming from the midfield.
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Take into account those two lonely points-paying finishes and the argument begins to form itself.
To be fair to Schumacher, the Haas car has been fairly inconsistent. Magnussen went through a five-race barren run in the middle of the year just as pressure was building on Schumacher to score his maiden points, and the Dane hasn’t finished in the top 10 since the Austrian Grand Prix either.
But two unspectacular seasons isn’t enough to mount an argument for retention. Further, while Magnussen is doing admirably in his first year back, the team believes it would benefit from another more experienced hand to guide it forward rather than a rookie or another driver of Schumacher’s inexperience.
Steiner has previously suggested a decision would be made at the end of the European season and into the early rounds of the flyways, which means there’s still time for Schumacher to mount a last-ditch final effort to either save his seat or asset his credentials to rival teams.
But after 17th in Belgium, up from 15th in qualifying but 19th on the grid, that clock is ticking ever more loudly.
COULD THE DUTCH ATMOSPHERE GET ANY BIGGER?
Finally we come to Formula 1’s 21st driver, the Dutch fans, and what effect they could have on the weekend.
Anyone who’s attended a race in Europe knows well the Dutch travelling fans. Some races, like Belgium and Austria, tend to be swamped by the orange army, but other less likely races, including the British Grand Prix, are well represented by those travelling from the Netherlands.
But nothing compares to a circuit completely rammed with all these people in one venue. As we saw last year, the first race back for Zandvoort in the modern era, they turn the atmosphere into something unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the sport — something more akin to a nightclub than a racetrack.
It might seem relatively inconsequential given the challenges teams and drivers will face from the circuit itself, but the weighty effect of seemingly national expectation did play on Verstappen’s mind this time last year, even if he didn’t admit it at the time.
“There I felt the pressure, even more than the Abu Dhabi GP,” Verstappen told his sponsor Car Next. “Everyone expected me to win, including the fans.
“I just wanted the whole weekend to be just perfect, and we couldn’t have done better.
“When I crossed the finish line I was relieved.”
Consider now that last year crowds were capped at around 70,000 people for COVID reasons but that more than 100,000 are expected today and you can understand how the pressure will be ratcheted up again in 2022.
That said, Verstappen is under substantially less duress this year, with the title largely done and dusted. It just might be that rather than potentially weighing him down, the relentless crowd becomes an additional weapon with which the Dutchman can dispatch his rivals.
“Let‘s see what we can do there,” he said. “I mean, of course I’m going to enjoy today and then we’ll see next week where we can do.”
