Mercedes judges harshly: "We were behind the times this weekend"

Lewis Hamilton failed to get any further than second place during Saturday afternoon's qualifying session for the Dutch GP, while his competitor Max Verstappen secured pole position. It makes for a great challenge, as Andrew Shovlin also knows.

At the Zandvoort circuit, overtaking is expected to be difficult during the race, making qualifying very important for the drivers. "We were behind this weekend," Shovlin stated in the press release. "Losing time with Lewis yesterday didn't help, but we were struggling with the car through Turn 2 and 3 and that was a trend that continued today in the morning session. We made some changes for qualifying, but we didn't have much visibility on that in the first half of qualifying because we were running on medium first and came out on cold tyres in the second session due to a red flag.

"In the last session we had hot tyres and the soft compound for the first time, and the car worked pretty well. Lewis finished less than four-hundredths of a second off Max and Valtteri would have been in too if corners 11 and 12 had been a little cleaner during his final run. So although we missed out on pole position, we can be happy with the progress. It's going to be very difficult to overtake, but two cars upfront is an advantage and from the sessions so far, incidents are likely, so there's still plenty of opportunities."

Verstappen at Dutch GP on P1

Unlike Mercedes, Red Bull Racing can employ trickier strategies this weekend. Sergio Pérez's sixteenth starting position means that the driver looks unlikely to be fighting for the points this weekend.