The Athletic.

The race is on, and F-1 is back, with the Dutch Grand Prix kicking off a 10-race run-in that

will decide the destiny of the driver's championship.

So what should we expect from this weekend at Zandvoort and the rest of the season beyond that? I'm Ed Strawn joining me to look ahead in the short and longer term. I'm Mark Hughes and Nelson Valkenberg. Well, Nelson, we'll come to you first. I'm surprised you've got time for this with the Dutch Grand Prix coming up. There's nothing like your home race, and especially after the summer break, trying to catch up with all the teams, getting all the timings fixed. The next few days are going to be crazy. Yeah, well, the Dutch Grand Prix is a crazy race, isn't it? Mark, you're going to be heading out there. And, yeah, always a great festival. Yeah, very much so. And whether the sun's shining or the rain is pouring, there's always a great party going on.

And, yeah, you sort of get immersed in that sort of festival feeling. Yeah, I suspect the weather might crop up in conversation, because we're going to obviously talk about the Dutch Grand Prix.

And Nelson, you're steeped in Dutch motorsport as a whole.

You're at the heart of F1's television coverage in the Netherlands.

So you'll be commentating, but this must be a huge week.

So how big a deal is the Zanvort event in the Netherlands?

It definitely is extremely big, but you are noticing that they are struggling to fill the seats for

the Friday I think Zandford is not really greatly served by the fact that it's neither a sprint

race nor it has F2 or F3 so the weekend has a bit of a weird feel about it but as Mark says it's

going to be a party a huge party even more so if Max actually manages to beat the McLaren's,

maybe Rain assisted, who knows. But it'll be a party nonetheless. And for us, it's crazy.

And you mention the sales. Is the fact that Vastappen probably won't have the machinery to challenge for victory playing a part in struggling to get people in sale on Friday?

I don't think it has helped, but we saw a bit of a dip already for the Friday last year.

And they've been really trying this year to increase the sales.

I don't know if you noticed that the similar vibe was on the Friday of the

Austrian Grand Prix. It looked really like the the grandsons were way emptier, especially the

first step and a grandstand. But it corrected itself for the Saturday and the Sunday,

and I expect the same for for this weekend for sure. That's the same, Mark, the possibility of rain at Zanvalt's quite tantalizing, isn't it?

Because it's a great track. It's a very low margin for error track there. So, yeah, some more wet running. We had a wet race there a few years ago. It would be pretty interesting, wouldn't it? Yeah, it's a sort of track where rain brings a lot of incident, safety cars, VSCs,

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