Max Verstappen had never finished lower than second at his home Grand Prix. He won the first three runnings of the modern Dutch Grand Prix in a row, matching a run nobody had managed at Zandvoort after Jim Clark in the mid-1960s, then followed it with back-to-back runner-up finishes the last two years. On Sunday, in the final Formula 1 race the circuit will ever host, that record ended on Lap 2, in the wall, in the rain, in front of the fans who had turned the dunes along the North Sea orange one last time.
“It looked like it was dry in that spot, so I tried to accelerate and it just caught me out,” Verstappen said afterward, describing the moment his Red Bull snapped away from him on a still-damp patch of banked asphalt. “It was still quite wet in that corner, but as soon as I was going through the corner, at one point I could see a little bit of a dry line coming, and I thought from this point on I could accelerate again. It caught me out, it’s as simple as that. I think it was too slippery. Somehow the car snapped and I couldn’t catch it. It snapped at a weird moment for me. Then I couldn’t catch it anymore.” He did not look for an excuse. “In the end it’s simply my mistake that I went off there. It was a weird moment. This weekend, of course, was disappointing. I think disappointing pace, and a disappointing end to the weekend. I think you can sum it up like that.”
Six Years of an Orange Party
Zandvoort returned to the Formula 1 calendar in 2021 after a 36-year absence, timed almost perfectly with Verstappen’s rise to the front of the grid. What followed was closer to a home-country festival than a typical race weekend. Fans in orange packed the dune-lined grandstands and the seaside town beyond them, and when Verstappen won, which he did in each of the race’s first three years back, the celebration spilled well past the circuit gates. He called it, in an Instagram post ahead of this year’s finale, “an iconic Grand Prix” that left him with “unforgettable memories that will last a lifetime.”
That connection made this year’s cancellation sting for more than just the driver. Robert van Overdijk, the event’s director, explained the decision in stark financial terms. “We have, without a doubt, written a success story,” he said. “But we are a privately funded race, and we had to carefully weigh up the risks and responsibilities. For this reason, we have decided to stop in 2026.” Organizers had explored a rotating slot on the calendar alongside other European venues, but the economics did not work for a race that receives no public funding, unlike most of Formula 1’s other stops. Verstappen, for his part, sounded resigned rather than bitter about the outcome in the days before the race. “It’s a shame, but I’m sure I will do more laps around there,” he said. “There are a lot of other series that still race there. The track is not going to disappear.”
A Farewell Weekend That Went Wrong Fast
This year’s edition added something new to the schedule itself, hosting Zandvoort’s first-ever Formula 1 sprint race, and forecasts calling for rain across all three days, a combination organizers hoped would deliver one last unforgettable show. George Russell delivered part of that promise by winning Saturday’s sprint ahead of Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris. Sunday brought the chaos instead. Verstappen qualified seventh, already off pace compared to his usual home form, and had barely completed a lap of the grand prix before he was in the wall and out of the race, the red flag freezing the field while marshals cleared his car.
Norris went on to win the race itself, his second consecutive victory of the season, holding off a fast-starting Kimi Antonelli and George Russell in a Mercedes one-two behind him. For Red Bull, the result was about as far from a fitting send-off as the weekend could have produced. Team principal Laurent Mekies did not try to soften the assessment afterward. “There’s no sugar-coating it,” he said of the weekend’s pace and result.
A Costly Result in a Tight Title Race
Beyond the emotion of a home farewell gone wrong, the crash carried real consequences for Verstappen’s championship hunt. He arrived at Zandvoort having retaken the points lead after a second-place finish in Hungary before the summer break, part of a run of form that had Red Bull believing it could still chase down a fifth consecutive drivers’ title. A DNF at a track where he had never finished off the podium erased that momentum in a single afternoon and handed a big points swing to Norris, who now leaves the Netherlands with back-to-back wins and control of the championship standings heading into the final stretch of the season. Antonelli’s podium and Russell’s fourth-place finish behind him also kept Mercedes firmly in the fight, meaning Red Bull now has three rival teams to worry about rather than one clear favorite to chase.
Mekies’s blunt assessment afterward reflected more than a single bad Sunday. Red Bull’s pace at Zandvoort had already looked short of its rivals before Verstappen crashed, continuing a pattern of tracks this year where the car has struggled to match the front-running McLarens and Mercedes. That combination, disappointing pace layered under a race-ending mistake, is why Verstappen himself reached for blunt language rather than any attempt to soften the weekend. He has built his reputation partly on refusing to make excuses when a result is his own doing, and Sunday was no exception.
What Verstappen Leaves Behind at Zandvoort
Even with Sunday’s result, Verstappen’s overall record at his home track remains one of the most dominant streaks by any driver at any circuit in the sport’s current era. Three wins in a row to open the race’s return, two second-place finishes after that, and now a single DNF that will stand as the outlier in an otherwise commanding run each time the numbers are revisited in years to come. Jim Clark still holds the outright record for most wins at Zandvoort with four, a mark set across the 1960s when the track last anchored the calendar for decades at a stretch. Verstappen came to this weekend with a real chance to match that number by his mid-twenties, before the corner, the damp patch and a fraction of a second decided otherwise.
What happens to Zandvoort next remains an open question. Verstappen has already said he plans to keep racing there in other series once Formula 1 leaves for good, treating Sunday’s crash as an unwelcome footnote to six years that, for both the driver and the fans who filled the dunes in orange one more time, delivered exactly what a home race is supposed to.
There is also a chance the sport revisits its own decision. Grands Prix have left the calendar before and returned, as Zandvoort itself proved after a 36-year gap, and F1’s growing list of countries bidding for race dates means a change in the private financing that sank this deal could reopen the conversation within a few years rather than decades. For now, though, the fans who lined the dunes in orange one final time watched their own driver’s home race end almost as soon as it began, a strange and abrupt way to close a run that, one lap aside, had been close to flawless from the day it started. Verstappen will race on. Red Bull will regroup for Monza. But Zandvoort, at least for the foreseeable future, will not host another chapter of a rivalry between a driver and his home crowd that produced six of the loudest weekends on the entire Formula 1 calendar.
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