And how nice of the calendar makers to keep us in the holiday mood with a trip to the Dutch seaside to kick off the final run of ten Grands Prix.

Cast your mind back to before the break and you will remember that we’d scored points in each of the four previous races, so we arrived in Holland hoping for more of the same. Heavy rain meant that Friday free practice was a scrappy affair for all ten teams, but the little data it generated suggested that we were competitive in the mid-field mix, especially with Yuki who ended the day seventh fastest. Daniel’s first job on track on Friday was to exorcise the ghosts of the 2023 Dutch weekend, when in the second free practice session he couldn’t avoid the stricken McLaren of fellow Aussie Oscar Piastri, breaking a metacarpal bone in his hand in seven places, which meant he missed the next five races. This Friday, as he passed the spot for the first time, he slowed down and “saluted” the corner.

The final practice session on Saturday morning was reduced to a handful of laps following Logan Sargeant’s big crash so it was hard to know what to expect going into qualifying on a “green” track. The stopwatch soon delivered the answer: we lacked a bit of pace, with Daniel going out in 16th place in Q1 and Yuki ending up 13th fastest in the second session. However, various penalties for others saw them promoted to 13th and 11th respectively on the starting grid.

The sun finally put in an appearance for the race, highlighting the sea of orange in the grandstands, the colour multi-tasking for local hero Max Verstappen and eventual race winners McLaren. We knew we had to take risks if we wanted to aim for points, so while Daniel ran a conventional one-stop race, we put Yuki on a two-stop, starting him on the Soft tyre, in the hope it would allow him to overtake a few of the Medium rubber runners around him in the early stages. It didn’t work out, as he actually lost a place off the line, eventually finishing 17th. “It was unideal” he said after the race. Taking the chequered flag in 12th spot, Daniel was actually the happiest he’d been with the car all weekend, but starting so far back on a narrow track where overtaking was almost impossible, points were not an option.

Our engineers have identified qualifying and the opening laps of the race as the areas to focus on most, while awaiting the arrival of further aero developments to deliver more performance. That work starts right now prior to this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix. Although it’s a second home race for us, not too far from the factory, we’ve joined all the other teams in heading straight from Zandvoort to the Monza circuit to start preparing the cars for the fastest race of the year.