F1MATHS: Who has improved the most at Zandvoort?
Qualifying saw McLaren display a dominant performance, with Oscar Piastri having fractionally beaten Lando Norris. F1Technical’s senior writer Balazs Szabo explains how much teams have improved compared to last season.
Having been quickest in all three free practice sessions and the first two parts of qualifying, Lando Norris was pipped to pole by team-mate Oscar Piastri in Q3.
The Australian was just 12 thousandths of a second quicker (1’08”662 to 1’08”674, equivalent to 74 centimetres). This is the fifth career pole for the championship leader, all of them coming this season. For McLaren it is pole number 173, its third at this circuit.
The second row of the grid features two Honda-powered cars, with the Red Bull of Max Verstappen third in 1’08”925 ahead of Isack Hadjar in the Racing Bulls with a 1’09”208, the Frenchman’s best ever qualifying performance.
But wait, who has improved the most compared to last year? Despite their utterly dominant performance so far at Zandvoort, McLaren has improved ‘only’ 1.011s. It is, of course, a huge performance gain compared to what they achieved twelve months ago, but there are even bigger improvements across the field.
Sauber drivers Gabriel Bortoleto and Nico Hulkenberg ended up 13th and 17th, respectively. Although it was not a result which Sauber could get particularly excited about, the Swiss team found the biggest gain compared to last year with their quickest lap having been 2.546s faster than what Sauber was able to achieve with Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu a year ago.
Ferrari might have struggled this weekend for pure grip, but the Scuderia achieved the second biggest performance improvement with 1.321s.
Last year’s qualifying also witnessed Ferrari struggle for one-lap performance, but Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc displayed a much more impressive race pace on Sunday which Ferrari certainly hope to replicate this Sunday.
Aston Martin, Racing Bulls, Haas, Alpine, Red Bull have all improved in the range of 1.0-1.2 seconds, whilst Mercedes found the least with a gain of nine tenths of a second.
