Formula 1’s summer intermission ends on Friday, August 21, when the pit lane opens at Zandvoort for a farewell weekend that adds another twist: for the first time, the Dutch Grand Prix will run a sprint format. F1 has confirmed that this is the final race at the seaside circuit before it drops off the 2027 calendar, with lights out for the grand prix at 3pm local time on Sunday.
Two teams arrive under a brighter spotlight than most. Cadillac, F1’s newest entrant, has replaced its team principal days before its return to the grid, while Haas has spent the break trying to work out why the car it thought would fight for regular points has slipped away.
Budkowski takes over a team still without a point
Cadillac axed team principal Graeme Lowdon on August 12 and appointed Marcin Budkowski in his place. Chief executive Dan Towriss did not hide who made the call.
“It was my decision, it wasn’t a mutual decision,” Towriss told Sky Sports.
Budkowski, who has previously worked at Ferrari, McLaren and Alpine, will run his first grand prix weekend for the team at Zandvoort. His stated focus is “aligning our people, tools and information flow so the right decisions are made quickly.”
The scoreboard explains the urgency. After 11 rounds Cadillac is the only team without a point, with nine grand prix retirements between Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas, and both cars have finished only one of the last seven races. Bottas’s 13th place in China remains the team’s best result.
Pérez, speaking before the break, put the problem plainly.
“It’s very difficult for our team to develop. We basically haven’t developed enough,” he told Grande Prêmio.
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“We need to rethink our processes to ensure we are capable of bringing much more performance.”
Bottas has offered a more upbeat reading of the trajectory.
“We’ve been able to pick up the pace [and] we’ve been able to get the car more reliable,” he said in an F1.com interview carried by Motorsport.com.
Haas have not scored since Monaco
At Haas the mood before Zandvoort is more subdued than it looked in April. Ollie Bearman took a season-best fifth in China during a run of three consecutive points finishes, but the British driver and team-mate Esteban Ocon have not scored since Monaco. The team sits seventh in the constructors’, 40 points behind Alpine.
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Team principal Ayao Komatsu’s group brought a new front wing to Belgium that Bearman said gave him more confidence in the car, but two first-lap punctures ruined the weekend and Haas finished a fourth straight race outside the points.
Bearman said the fight has been uneven this year.
“It’s not always a fair fight, the one that we are having, and sometimes we feel like we’re fighting with our hands almost tied behind our backs,” he told Motorsport Week.
He identified consistency as the underlying issue.
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“The inconsistency between our parts has been quite high,” he said.
“You’re always chasing a moving target. Overnight, we can have changes to our car balance without expecting that.”
A further Haas upgrade is expected after Zandvoort. Cadillac has 24 sprint laps on Saturday to find what the first half of the season did not give it.
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