Dutch Grand Prix LIVE: Max Verstappen wins home race to leapfrog Lewis Hamilton in championship

The Alpine pair of Fernando Alonso and Estaban Ocon have made strong starts, with both cars overtaking Antonio Giovinazzi’s Alfa Romero early on and moving up to 7th and 8th behind both Ferraris.

Verstappen already has a 1.7s lead after a storming opening lap.

The first Dutch Grand Prix in 36 years is underway and Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton have made a clean start, with the Dutchman holding onto first place into turn one.

Mechanics are making their way back to the garages and away from the grid as the drivers make their way around the Zandvoort circuit on the formation lap, with crowd going wild once again as Max Verstappen leads the pack.

The vast majority of drivers are starting on the soft tyre, with this expected to be a one-stop race. George Russel in P11 is the highest-placed driver to start on the mediums, though, and Sergio Perez will be enduring a long first stint and he opts to go with the hards from the pitlane.

We’ll be underway in just over a minute.

This race is the first time Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton start on the front row together since Silvertsone earlier this summer, when the two came together exiting Copse corner, causing an enormous crash which put the Dutchman out of the race.

Hamilton starts on the inside here and knows his best chance to win the race is to make an overtake early, with the majority of the lap unlikely to present opportunities.

That means Hamilton could be aggressive in turn one, and with Verstappen unlikely to yield too easily, contact between the two is definitely possible.

Aston Martin team boss Otmar Szafnauer has been speaking to former wold champion Nico Rosberg on the grid for Sky Sports about Sebastian Vettel’s lowly starting position.

Vettel was blocked by both Haas drivers as he tried to finish his flying lap in Q1 yesterday afternoon, with a glut of drivers moving slowly around the final corners of the circuit as they tried to build gaps before starting their flying laps.

Szafnauer wants action, saying: “Maybe we need rules to stop this kind of thing happening again in future. Or we already have rules but we need to use them more.”

Vettel, on the other hand, seemed more concerned by his team’s strategy decision to send him out at inconvenient time when he spoke to the media yesterday.

With just fifteen minutes to go until lights out, the atmosphere at Zandvoort is becoming increasingly berserk.

The fog of orange smoke bombs covered every corner of the track as Max Verstappen drove his Red Bull car to the grid a little while ago, and now a variety of DJs are whipping the crowd into a frenzy on the start-finish straight before the national anthem.

The circuit is located right next to the beach on the northern coast of the country, and it’s such a pleasure to see the joy on all of the faces in the crowd after 18 months without mega events like this, and without a Grand Prix taking place in the Netherlands since 1985.

Christian Horner has been speaking to Sky Sports about the difficulty of facing two Mercedes with just one car up the front, and also the temperament of Max Verstappen in front of a fervent home crowd.

On Hamilton and Bottas starting directly behind Verstappen, the Red Bull team principal explained: “It gives them strategic options. They can split their strategies and it’s difficult to cover both, so we’ve got to pick our battles and we know who that’s really with. The best thing for us to get our heads out in front and get on with it.

“Max has been hugely impressive because this whole place is about him, and he’s managed to separate himself from that. He’s going about things as normal even though it’s like being at a festival for three days here. It’s quite sensational.”

Zandvoort is a notoriously difficult track to overtake around, thanks to its narrow profile and succession of medium speed corners throughout the middle sector.

Yesterday’s qualifying session, though, has left us with a mixed up grid with plenty of drivers out of position, including Lando Norris in 13th, Sebastian Vettel in 15th and Sergio Perez who will start from the pitlane.

All three cars should be faster than plenty of those around them, and none of them will want to spend too long stuck behind slower cars. But with so few obvious overtaking zones, the chance of elaborate manoeuvres, and possibly crashes, is high.

Lewis Hamilton was within 0.038s of an unexpected pole position yesterday afternoon as the seven-time world champion pulled together an almost flawless lap to finish far closer to Max Verstappen than either Red Bull or Merecedes would have predicted before the weekend.

Verstappen’s car is ultimately still faster at the moment, though, and the key to a possible Hamilton victory this afternoon could well be calls made by the Merc pitwall as the race goes on.

With Valtteri Bottas starting third and able to act as a rear gunner as long as he gets away well, Mercedes could pull the Finn in for an early stop. That would force Verstappen’s hand, too, but Hamilton would then have the potential to carry on for a longer first stint, before ending the race on fresher, quicker tyres.

It could well be the current champion hunting down the apparent heir to the throne in a thrilling chase to the finish.

While the likes of Fernando Alonso and Sergio Perez have recently signed new contracts with their respective teams to carry on driving into 2022, a number of drivers are uncertain about their seats and could do with strong performances at Zandvoort in order to safeguard their futures.

Antonio Giovinazzi was given three races to prove himself worth of continuing with Alfa Romeo by team boss Fred Vasseur during the summer break, and with the Belgian race last weekend a complete non-event in the end, this is his first opportunity to make a case for himself ahead of the 2022 regulation change.

The Italian produced a storming lap in Q3 on Saturday and will start seventh today with team-mate and stand-in Robert Kubica down in 18th. Valtteri Bottas, meanwhile, is heavily linked with replacing Kimi Raikkonen with the Swiss outfit next season and surely need to produce an incredible performance to make Toto Wolff consider keeping the Finn on rather than replacing him with George Russell.