The Dutch Grand Prix was never a happy hunting ground for Bruce McLaren, who registered seven DNFs at Zandvoort and two non-points finishes in the nine championship races he started there. But on the 88th anniversary of McLaren’s birth, cars carrying his name enjoyed a formidable margin of superiority to their Formula 1 rivals: more than two tenths of a second in hand over third-placed Max Verstappen, and half a second from fourth-placed Isack Hadjar.
Maybe not the kind of dominance Jim Clark enjoyed in the 1964 event, when Bruce finished a distant seventh, two laps down, while the victorious Clark crossed the line nearly a minute ahead of second-placed John Surtees. The margins are different in contemporary F1, especially when it comes to the McLaren team-mates. Just 0.012s separated Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris in Q3, only the second timed session in which Piastri was quicker than his stablemate.
