Lando Norris did what he desperately needed to do to dominate the Dutch Grand Prix, beating local hero Max Verstappen by over 20 seconds in a straight contest in a standard one-stop medium/hard race. This was after spending the first 20 laps behind the faster-starting Red Bull. That much faster was the McLaren.

Norris was of course a little disheartened that he had lost to Verstappen at the start, again. But he was driving a car that he had qualified with over 0.35s faster, so all was not lost.

“The pace was really high,” said the now two-time Formula 1 race winner. “The car felt incredible, I could really push… I knew it pretty early on because Max wasn’t pushing and I was. We were getting faster and faster. Maybe lap six or seven, something like that.”

It took a while for McLaren to understand how superior he felt. “I think it was around lap 15,” said team boss Andrea Stella, “when it became clear, and we thought: let’s not think about undercutting, because this situation will resolve itself with an overtake.”

The overtaking section was made much easier than it would have been otherwise – due to the size of Verstappen’s rear wing: a maximum downforce Monaco wing. He was therefore vulnerable once Norris took advantage of Verstappen’s greater tyre degradation and got himself into his DRS range. The overtaking was simple.

“We think they’re trying to undercut us,” said race engineer Will Joseph Norris, “but that’s fine.” Norris had more than enough speed to get well out of undercut range and from that point on Verstappen concentrated on securing second place.

Part of it was the MCL38 upgrade and its more efficient rear wing. Part of it was the generally wider set-up sweet spot – and part of it was Red Bull having lost its way a bit of late and, spooked by the McLaren’s speed, opting to try and beat it by fitting it with a wing with a better tyre pressure.

Far too much, as it turned out, on a day when the tyre temperature was much lower than expected. So low that Norris was able to set the fastest lap of the race on his final lap on hard tyres that were 44 laps old.

Not only that, but the older spec floor Verstappen was using was reportedly around 0.2s slower than the newer version used by Sergio Perez after the race, according to the team. But the deficit from the incorrect wing setup was even greater, the team believes.

So with a less weather-battered set of practice sessions to gather more data, a different floor and wing, could the RB20 be a match for the improved version of the McLaren? Christian Horner doesn’t think so, not quite. Not around here.

The McLaren was just too good in the fast, long, connected corners, its tyre pressure was so much better thanks to its balanced downforce. It was like Hungary, but with a bit more downforce.

There are still some basic principles of the Red Bull that the team doesn’t understand, but the 144 laps of data collected between the two cars on two different specs has already given the team a clear direction to unravel the puzzle, according to Horner.

Verstappen would probably have struggled to finish second if Oscar Piastri had not beaten George Russell’s Mercedes at the start and been stuck in the Mercedes for the entire first stint.

Pushing hard to get the sort of tyre offset in the second stint that would have taken him past the Mercedes, he was undercut by Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari, which had been far more effective in the race than in qualifying. Leclerc’s early first stop had also taken him past Russell, moving him up to third – not too far behind Verstappen.

Piastri on hard tyres, eight laps newer than the Russells and nine newer than the Leclercs, passed the Mercedes quickly but had used up most of his rubber catching the Ferrari’s tail. With the more straightforward race a better start line performance would have bought him, and he may well have beaten Verstappen. In the clear air his pace was about the same as Norris. Fourth place underestimated his potential.

Leclerc did a perfect job of securing third place, the Ferrari good enough on his tyres to be a much better car on race day. Team-mate Carlos Sainz came from a lowly 10th on the grid strongly to move up to fifth, in a flurry of brazen overtakes, the last of which was on Perez’s Red Bull.

Mercedes brought Russell in for a second stop in what was generally a one-stop race, as he was about to be passed by the charging Sainz. The thinking was that the soft tyres used would allow him to both retake the place he had ceded to Perez by stopping, and perhaps also overtake the older Ferrari (both on hard tyres). He failed to do so.

The Mercedes simply didn’t have great pace and Russell’s early push on the softs left him vulnerable to team-mate Lewis Hamilton who had started 13th, nine places behind Russell. Hamilton also stopped twice, having started on the softs rather than the mediums of almost everyone else. Russell stayed ahead, but a 7-8 finish was not what the team that finished 1-2 at Spa had expected.

The car was a little off-balance, overloading the rear, and that may be partly a result of the weather-interrupted practice sessions. But overall, this track and its long corners on a relatively cool day seem to produce a greater spread of tyre performance than most, exaggerating the differences between the cars that work and the cars that don’t – and the Mercedes seemed very sensitive to track temperatures all weekend.

Pierre Gasly made a series of devilish overtakes around the outside of Tarzan – on Fernando Alonso at the start and Nico Hulkenberg at the end – to take a distant but creditable ninth place for Alpine, with Alonso taking the final point.

Norris’ win and fastest lap earned him eight points over Verstappen, but that still leaves him 70 points behind with nine races (and three sprints) to go. He will need to repeat this result at almost every race if he wants to overtake Verstappen’s lead.

“On these kind of tracks I think we can be sure that we will perform strongly. High downforce, long corners,” says Stella.

“When we go to circuits where you have high-speed corners, like in Silverstone, we know that Red Bull is very strong in these layouts. And yet I think that when we go back to Austria, they will be faster. Because in Austria they had a four-tenths advantage in qualifying.

“But I think with the upgrades we will now be more competitive, even in the places where Red Bull was potentially faster than us.”