Lando Norris faces a critical test to win Formula 1's 2024 Dutch Grand Prix – seeing off Max Verstappen at the race start amid heavy scrutiny of his getaways this season.
Norris lost possible wins in Spain and Hungary after not converting pole positions into the lead out of the first corner at those events. He currently has a 0-3 record of winning from heading the grid.
As he prepares to start from a fourth career F1 pole position at Zandvoort on Sunday, Norris shot down any focus on this statistic during Saturday's post-qualifying press conference.
"Honestly, stats to me don't mean a lot," he said. "I've started on or towards the front a lot of times. I know my stats are not the best for that. And more often than not, I've kind of gone backwards rather than holding positions.
"People can write what they want. They can have their own opinions. A lot of these things are true and are facts to people. But yeah, it's more just using them to my advantage and improve on my weaknesses. Simple as that."
But the pressure on this area of Norris's skillset is considerable in Sunday's race, with overtaking set to be at a premium amongst the frontrunning cars in a dry race given the lack of passing between them at the wider, faster, lower-downforce layout used last time out at Spa.
The Dutch race also follows Norris going wide at the first corner in the Belgian GP and shipping positions, which had McLaren vowing to investigate what had happened heading into the summer break.
Team chief designer Rob Marshall said as the Zandvoort weekend got underway that McLaren is "not worried about our start performance" as "you look at the numbers, I think we've been getting off the line pretty reasonably".
Indeed, Norris's reaction times in Spain and Hungary were not the issue – it was the second phase of the starts where he lost out to Verstappen and team-mate Oscar Piastri respectively.
Marshall said: "There's others that are a bit better, but it's not something we're concerned about." Meanwhile, Norris's own assessment was: "I know my starts have not been my forte over the last [races] probably... [but] they've not been bad.
"Honestly, I'm still up there with being one of the best average starters," he added. "I've just missed out on a couple of races and maybe slightly worse than what it's been over the course of a season."
Norris also insisted: "There's a couple of times when they've not been quite where they need to be have been a couple of times I've been on the front row." However, he suggested each was for different reasons.
In Hungary, he cited a gearshift problem as costing him critical momentum, while in Spain he blamed "the drive out" phase for not matching Verstappen's own.
"They've not been for any certain reason," Norris added. "They've been different things each time. But I feel confident I put in a good amount of work to kind of try and make my starts a bit better."
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said after qualifying at Zandvoort that his squad had been working on improving the "combination of the drivers' execution, but also what the engineers are in condition to support in terms of tyre preparation, clutch settings, throttle control".
This was after Stella had concluded: "Definitely we left a little bit of performance behind [at some races], so there's a few things that we needed to adjust."
On the Hungary example, Stella explained: "The first two seconds was done probably when there was a bit too much wheelspin and therefore the shift was downgraded and he was slow, and therefore you lose the momentum in what is a combination between the car status with wheelspin."
He conceded that Norris "could've controlled wheelspin better" that day, but also insisted "our settings probably weren't the best for that condition".
"In Hungary and in Spain, there was also the fact that there were two long straights down to corner one and there was also the slipstream effect," Stella added. "[George] Russell was the one that took advantage in Barcelona, thanks to the slipstream [going from fourth to lead out of Turn 1, where Verstappen passed Norris too]."
The run to the first corner at Zandvoort is short enough – 164m versus 549m and 472m in Spain and Hungary – that this should not be much of a factor in Sunday's race.
But given Norris's error at the first corner in Belgium and as he is going up against a driver trying to maintain a perfect winning record in front of his home crowd in F1, the pressure will drive up if it comes to battling Verstappen wheel to wheel early on.
Plus, with Red Bull making a big improvement on its starts systems last year, its motorsport advisor Helmut Marko was keen to turn the pressure screw on Norris ahead of Sunday's race.
"Having seen how difficult overtaking was at Spa, it's probably impossible here," he told Red Bull's in-house broadcast channel ServusTV.
"You mentioned Lando Norris' 'weakness'. He knows that Max is strong. It will certainly be an interesting first [corner]."
But Stella, having taken a close personal look at Norris's various start drops in 2024, concluded that his driver was not showing a trend of mistakes at early corners.
"If you look at the onboard of Lando in Hungary in corner one, he makes a bit of a miracle trying not to hit Oscar and hit Verstappen on the outside," Stella said, albeit without directly addressing what Norris did at Spa.
"So, I don't think he would've done much better than that without taking serious risks to have a collision. And in a similar way, this happened in Barcelona.
"And also in Barcelona I have to say, in a track in which pace is so important, you can overtake, you can regain positions, sometimes you just have to give up a little bit from a risk attitude point of view – because the race will come to you later.
"The problem in Barcelona is that it proved to be difficult to overtake the Mercedes and then we lost quite a bit of time to Verstappen that was [ahead].
"So, I personally could not find much room to improve in what I saw was the approach to corner one without taking risks that myself I would have judged like 'that was too much risk' in my conversation with the drivers.
"I'd rather stay in the race, I'd rather see if we can recover positions if the situation is one where if try too hard you may be out of the race at lap one.
"And when you have this kind of pace [to top F1 qualifying sessions], this kind of performance, you want to get to the chequered flag."
The outcome of the Zandvoort start and the order out of Tarzan on Sunday is therefore set to be even more critical than usual to McLaren's hopes of reaching that point and claiming a third race win of 2024.
