With Lando Norris claiming his career’s fourth pole position, the Briton will be trying his best to make sure that he can convert that into a race win at the Dutch GP. However, the McLaren driver hasn’t really been quite successful when starting from the front of the grid. Every time Norris has started from Pole, poor get-offs from the lines resulted in him failing to keep his lead out of turn 1. His only race win, in Miami, came when he started from P5 and managed to get a good start from the grid. This can be a golden opportunity for Norris’ teammate Oscar Piastri to bag a second race win if he can capitalize on Lando’s poor race start.

Norris himself is quite aware of the situation, even talking about his race starts during the post-qualifying press conference at the Dutch GP. When asked by Fred Ferret of l’Equipe about the battle that he will have with Verstappen into turn 1, Norris said, “Yes. I mean, it’s obvious. I know my starts have not been my forte over the last probably… They’ve not been bad, honestly, I’m still up there with being one of the best average starters.”

As for Norris’s teammate Oscar Piastri, this whole situation means that the Australian driver can dream of racking up his second F1 race win. Piastri will be starting the Dutch GP from P3, behind Norris and Verstappen. Having won the Hungarian GP in one of the most thrilling ways possible, we already know the Aussie youngster has it in him to grab victories at the Grand Prix. Should he put together a strong start, it is possible that he might win the race because of the way McLaren has matched Red Bull in terms of speed.

Piastri mentioned how the race start would be a good opportunity for him to get himself into the lead of the race. The Melbourne native said that he wants to take home as many points as possible from Zandvoort but he also stated that he wouldn’t actually want to do anything different in order to make a good start. He said to the FIA, “I mean, I think the start is always a good opportunity to make up ground if you can. Yeah, obviously I want to finish as high as I can.”

While Piastri wants a repeat of the Hungarian GP where he got the better of Lando Norris and soared to victory, McLaren cannot afford that—but why?

McLaren would be desperate to avoid a Hungarian GP repeat

While the Hungarian GP did mark the debut F1 race win for Oscar Piastri, the situation wasn’t quite pleasant for McLaren as a team. The Woking outfit had to issue team orders and almost had to coax Norris into letting Piastri overtake him and win the race. His engineer even brought up talks of the Championship fight against Max Verstappen. After several pundits criticized their desperation, McLaren might want to ensure that nothing of this sort happens at the Dutch GP.

Talking about whether Piastri would be interested in helping Norris out in the Turn 1 battle in the Netherlands, Piastri mentioned that managing to overtake Verstappen will surely be beneficial for the team as a whole. However, the Australian also made it clear that his main priority would be to win the race himself.

So, Lando Norris is on pole, and Oscar Piastri is eager to snatch that position from his teammate. Is this the start of an intra-McLaren rivalry?