George Russell converts pole to victory in a Dutch Grand Prix sprint race that saw very minimal action across the grid.
There was a couple of overtakes which took place at the start of the race, as Antonelli made an overtake on Piastri to climb up to 4th, while Hulkenberg would drop from a starting position of 14th all the way down to 19th.
However, most of the grid ended the first lap in the same positions as they qualified, and we quickly saw how difficult it would be for drivers to overtake one another as they would begin to follow each other for lap after lap.
This isn’t to say that drivers weren’t close to one another, the pack at the front were consistently close to one another, with Antonelli in particular looking the most aggressive in his desire to pass Leclerc for third place, while Hamilton was harassing Verstappen for 6th before needing to back away.
Sergio Perez seemed to fail in starting the race, but had managed to get going a couple laps after the start, and while he would be a couple of laps down, it was never likely that he would’ve challenged for points anyway due to the limitations of his Cadillac being one of the slowest cars on the grid.
Hulkenberg’s sprint race went from bad to worse as he was forced to come in to the pits and retire on lap 6 due to something going wrong in his Audi.
After more laps of processional racing, Charles Leclerc would make an overtake on Lando Norris to take 2nd place, making the move stick on the inside of turn 1 on lap 18. While this was the only overtake after lap 1 shown on the broadcast, there had been another earlier on in the race as Alonso used his newly upgraded Aston Martin to overtake Bottas for 18th place, but would fail to climb any higher.
There was a risk of rain looming in the dying laps of the race, and while it started falling on the last lap of the race, it was too late to provide any sort of challenge to the drivers, and Russell was able to continue his strong start to the weekend with an uncontested victory.
