Verstappen never made it past the opening lap of the Dutch Grand Prix on Sunday. He clipped a wheel over the white line at Zandvoort’s banked final corner, snapped the rear away from him, and buried the car in the barrier hard enough to bring out the red flags.

His stand-in team-mate was still going.

Liam Lawson, called back into the Red Bull cockpit days before the weekend to cover for an injured Isack Hadjar, brought the sole surviving Red Bull home in seventh. A ten-second penalty for a yellow-flag infringement did not shake him off the position. Six points, banked.

Verstappen’s ‘easier’ verdict

Then came the media round. Asked about the pace his substitute had shown all weekend, having qualified just 0.115 seconds behind him, Verstappen turned the answer toward the machinery, not the driver.

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“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 added that qualifying margins had been “super small” all season, telling PlanetF1 that “everyone was always within one tenth, two tenths.”

That answer was the one relayed back to Nico Rosberg in the Sky Sports studio after the race. The 2016 world champion did not hide his reaction.

“Not very nice of him to say that, is it!”

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“He could have praised his stand-in for doing a great job!”

Lawson returns to unfinished business

The compliment Verstappen would not give landed on a driver with a very specific score to settle in the second Red Bull seat. Lawson was dropped from the senior team after just two races of the 2025 season, following a DNF in Melbourne and a 12th place in Shanghai. Red Bull confirmed on 27 March 2025 that Yuki Tsunoda would take his seat from the Japanese Grand Prix, sending the New Zealander down to Racing Bulls.

After matching Verstappen’s qualifying lap to a tenth on his return, Lawson told reporters the weekend had been as much about outside perception as inner conviction.

“I mean, obviously for me, it’s something I’ve always known internally, and with different circumstances and things going differently, but obviously maybe to you guys and to the world now, you can see it as well.”

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He also said he had arrived at Zandvoort “not really thinking too much about anything to do with my future and what car I’m driving at the moment.”

A familiar pundit target

Verstappen’s history of tense relationships with Red Bull team-mates, from Daniel Ricciardo to Sergio Pérez, has run through his championship years.

Lawson keeps the Red Bull seat while Hadjar recovers from the wrist injury he sustained during the summer shutdown.

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