– Why did Kimi Antonelli’s pace suddenly disappear at the Dutch Grand Prix last weekend? The Mercedes driver led the race in Zandvoort for a long time but was overtaken by Lando Norris at the start of lap 54 – and then had to let the McLaren go.
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“Bono, something is wrong with the car. It’s like the aerodynamics are breaking down,” the championship leader radioed to his race engineer Peter Bonnington a few laps before the end of the race. Mercedes has since confirmed that there was indeed a problem.
“Each tire tended to oversteer a bit more than the previous one, and we are trying to find out why,” explains Mercedes engineer Andrew Shovlin, emphasizing: “We did not touch the car and made no changes to the aerodynamics.”
Such adjustments are usually “exactly the things that could have explained the phenomenon. That’s why we are currently analyzing the data very thoroughly and trying to get to the bottom of it. Because it is important to solve such problems before the next race,” he stresses.
Photo gallery: Zandvoort: Driver ratings by Marc Surer and the editorial team
Shovlin recalls in this context that Mercedes’ lead at the top of Formula 1 has recently shrunk. “In terms of performance, it is now obviously really tight,” he warns ahead of the next race in Monza.
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The defeat against McLaren in Zandvoort meant that Mercedes was unable to win two races in a row for the first time in the 2026 season. At the last race before the summer break in Spa, world champion Norris and McLaren had already been ahead.
“We are still waiting for our big update to arrive. That will help us, but until then it will be quite a fight,” says Shovlin. Because the new parts for the W17 are only expected to be fitted to the car at the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia in early October.
Until then, the races in Monza, Madrid, and Baku could again be a close fight for Mercedes against the competition. It is all the more important to avoid unexpected problems like recently in Zandvoort.
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