He didn’t even make it through a full racing lap. Zandvoort’s final appearance on the calendar, the one Max Verstappen had circled to send his home crowd off in style, started with an aborted formation lap, moved on to two drivers jumping the gun under yellow flags, and ended with Verstappen himself in the wall before lap 1 was even complete. Here’s how it all unfolded, piece by piece.
Table Of Content
The start that wasn’t
Things went sideways before the lights even went out. Oliver Bearman came to a stop at the exit of Turn 10 during the formation lap engine failure, he reported over the radio, “everything turned off”. Race control had no choice but to abort that first start and order an extra formation lap while marshals cleared the stricken Haas. For Bearman, already having a rough weekend at Zandvoort, Sunday ended right there, without racing a single competitive metre.
Once the track was clear, the second start went ahead — this time, for real.
Antonelli beats Norris off the line
Norris had started from pole, but the moment the lights went out Kimi Antonelli went for it: he dove down the inside, squeezed Norris against the pit wall, and took the lead into Turn 1. A few metres back, Oscar Piastri did the same to George Russell at Turn 7, a move that pushed him up to fourth. The order at the front was already scrambled before the lap was done.
Two drivers jumped the yellow flags
This is where the chaos multiplies. At some point on that opening lap, double waved yellow flags came out tied, by most accounts, to the very moment Verstappen was losing control, and in the middle of that confusion both Arvid Lindblad and Franco Colapinto gained positions while the yellows were flying. Nothing subtle about it; the replays made that pretty clear.
Stewards opened investigations into both almost immediately. The verdict came fast too: a drive-through penalty for Lindblad, and the same for Colapinto, both for breaching the yellow flag regulations. Esteban Ocon also came under scrutiny for a pass on Alex Albon into Turn 1 in that same scrambled stretch, though in his case the stewards ultimately took no action.
Too much happening at once to process it live? Absolutely. And the worst was still to come.
The crash that changed everything
With the track still wet from rain before the start, Verstappen arrived at the final corner — the Arie Luyendijkbocht, the flat-out banked turn that leads onto the main straight — and clipped the white line on the inside. On asphalt that slick, that’s all it takes to lose the car completely. What followed was a spin, a head-on hit against the outside wall, and the car sliding back across the track before coming to rest on the inside. Both left-side wheels were torn off in the impact.
Pierre Gasly narrowly avoided the stranded car, and Nico Hülkenberg later admitted over the radio he nearly ended up on top of his own teammate, Gabriel Bortoleto, who also spun at the same spot without hitting anything. It could have been a lot worse than it was.
Verstappen climbed out under his own power and confirmed straight away that he was fine — asked how he felt when he reached the TV pen, he simply said “Good.” What he said next is what’s going to stick from this farewell: he owned the mistake without hesitation, describing how he’d been “caught out” by the damp patch through the banking, and offered a short apology to his team over the radio. No excuses about the conditions, no excuses about the car.
It’s the first time in six editions at Zandvoort that Verstappen has failed to finish his home race — he’d stood on the podium’s top two steps in each of the previous five.
A weekend he already called disappointing
Even before the crash, Verstappen hadn’t been hiding his frustration with the RB22’s pace across the weekend. Asked to sum up where Red Bull stands right now, he didn’t sugarcoat it: “We are the fourth-fastest team, so it’s not like walking up to Zandvoort and suddenly we can do some magic things.” He pointed to the upgrades other teams brought that Red Bull didn’t, adding that being on the back foot only compounds itself once the season is this far along.
Earlier in that same lap, before reaching the final corner, he’d also been squeezed toward the grass in a four-wide moment heading into Turn 1, then spent several corners wheel-to-wheel with his new teammate Liam Lawson. He didn’t seem to mind that part at all — “we are allowed to race, so I think that’s normal,” he said of the battle between the two Red Bulls.
Red flag, and the wait begins
The damage to the car and the barriers was enough for race control to throw the red flag almost immediately. The race stopped with Norris at the head of the field — though the real lead already belonged to Antonelli since the start — while teams and marshals raced against the clock to get the track ready to go again. Lindblad and Colapinto, meanwhile, still had their penalties waiting to be served once the action resumed.
Zandvoort only had its spot on the calendar guaranteed through this edition. Having the circuit’s farewell defined by its own hometown hero’s crash, after an aborted start and two lap-1 penalties, is the kind of script nobody would have asked for to close this chapter.
Source: Autosport, Crash.net, GPFans, Motorsport.com, Total-Motorsport
No Comment! Be the first one.