How was Dutch GP for Ferrari in the last two years?
In 2022, Leclerc had a gap to Verstappen of 26s in 55 laps before the SC came out. In the remaining 11 full laps after SC period, Leclerc was gapped by further 11s, bringing up the
total gap to 37s over 66 laps. Leclerc was 0.56s per lap slower on average and only had a small time loss in the 2-3 laps before overtaking Hamilton after SC. Sainz' race was heavily compromised by pitting early and hitting traffic in lap 15, so his race is not representative.
In 2023, after tricky Q3 session for both drivers, Leclerc was hit by Piastri and had terminal floor damage. Sainz drove a good race and made up 1 place vs starting grid. After 9 laps, the gap to Verstappen was 15s in Intermediate conditions. There was a brief period of running on softs before there was a SC period and running restarted on Lap 21. By lap 59, the gap grew by 28 seconds while running on Softs in two stints, before there was another SC period. In the final 6 laps, the gap grew by further 10s. Overall,
total gap was 53s over 53 laps, meaning Sainz was on average slower by 1s a lap than Verstappen.
In 2024, Leclerc had a gap of 2.5s over 72 laps to Verstappen, making it by far the best Dutch GP for Ferrari compared to Red Bull. Leclerc in fact ended the Lap 1 with 3.4s to Max so over the remaining 71 laps Leclerc was fractionally quicker than Verstappen. When we take the gap to race winner Norris into account, it was
25.4s over 72 laps to race winner. Averaging 0.35s per lap,
this was 2 tenths a lap better pace compared to race winner than it was in 2022.
As for
WCC points, standings after 15 races are as follows:
2004 - 557 (latest points system)
2007 - 417 (latest points system)
2017 – 385
2022 – 376
2023 - 265
2024 – 370
The season is very close to season 2017 (reminder, 2018 started off worse than 2017 so I will only compare total points at the end of that season), basically still equal to 2022 (thanks a million Binotto, Rueda, Xavi and co.
) and only recently became clearly worse than season 2007 - when there were only 2 teams fighting for race wins.