The two substitute drivers in the Zandvoort paddock both got within about a tenth of the men they were measured against. Liam Lawson, in a Red Bull RB22 he had never sat in before Friday, qualified eighth - his first Q3 as a Red Bull driver - 0.115s adrift of Max Verstappen. Yuki Tsunoda, handed the Racing Bulls seat with one simulator day and no 2026 race mileage, was 0.102s from Arvid Lindblad in Q2.
To Verstappen, that is a verdict on the regulations rather than a compliment to the stand-ins.
"Especially in qualifying, I think it's a lot easier nowadays with these cars to find the limit, because you're also in quite a few places where you're a bit down on battery and everything becomes a bit easier to land," he told The Race. He added: "You see it already the whole season; everyone is always within one tenth, two tenths. If you have a very bad qualifying, three tenths. It's always the margins are small."
Andrea Stella will not have it.
"These cars are classified by both our drivers - I don't know about the others - as difficult cars to drive," the McLaren team principal said. "Definitely last year we could see much less scatter between the two drivers. Here, when a driver is a bit on the back foot, then this can be a large amount."
Stella itemised the difficulty: low grip, reduced downforce and smaller tyres through corners; erratic energy deployment on the straights. "Sometimes the frustrating element that you go on power early in high speed and now you're losing deployment later," he said, along with a superclip arriving before braking and erasing a driver's reference.
The Race's Josh Suttill and Jon Noble ran the numbers and found ammunition for both arguments. Across the two Zandvoort qualifying sessions Lawson averaged 0.245s behind Verstappen - essentially level with Isack Hadjar's 0.232s season figure, the tightest any Red Bull team-mate has run to Verstappen since Daniel Ricciardo's 2018. Six of the ten established teams have narrower intra-team gaps than last year, and 2026's widest, the 0.303s between Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll, would only have been the third biggest of 2025.
Their caveats matter too. Hadjar has been excellent, Lawson has had a strong year at Racing Bulls, and both Hamilton and Antonelli are in far better shape than in 2025. Eleven races is not a conclusion.
Piastri has voiced a version of the same unease, complaining that qualifying is often settled by computers behaving or misbehaving rather than by what the driver does.
Lawson, for his part, describes a weekend of hard work rather than an easy car. "It's been a challenging weekend trying to get used to this car. It's very different to drive," he told Speedcafe, singling out the steering: "Other than the power unit, it's just the way the car turns into corners. The steering is the most different. We have very different steering feels just in terms of how much we use, how much we lock the car."
The cockpit itself has hurt. "I think it's just ergonomically being in a different position and a different seat. Like I've struggled so much more with just physically being in the car."
His pole-shootout lap was improvised on the spot. With rain approaching, Red Bull scrapped the build laps he had used all session and sent him out on a straight push run. "I hadn't done it before, so I had no idea going into Turn 1 what I was going to get," he said. He lost the front at Turn 10 and thinks a better lap was there.
On the 2025 Red Bull stint that ended in demotion after two races, Lawson was direct. "Maybe for everybody else to see. Obviously, as drivers, we have plenty of self-belief. All of us. Maybe too much sometimes," he told Sky Sports F1. "With everything that happened last year, it's something that was a very tough thing to go through. But for me personally, I knew that with the right circumstances, with more time, I know what I can do with a race car, and it was nice to at least put that to paper today."
Suttill was cooler on the sprint, where Lawson ran 11th and could not get past Lindblad. He graded the weekend respectable rather than spectacular, and pinned the sprint problem on Friday's SQ3 miss.
Verstappen's own Saturday brought no reward for effort. "Yeah, we changed quite a bit, and it actually didn't make a difference," he said of the post-sprint work. "So the balance was pretty much the same as what I had all weekend."