> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://slipstreampaddock.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Tot ziens, Zandvoort: a farewell to the Dutch Grand Prix - URL: https://slipstreampaddock.com/tot-ziens-zandvoort-a-farewell-to-the-dutch-grand-prix/ - Published: 2026-08-23T09:11:41.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-23T11:01:42.000Z - Author: Kris Pinter - Tags: Race report, #Import 2026-08-23 18:58 The final Dutch Grand Prix runs today. After 38 races on the same patch of North Sea dunes, Formula 1 gives the happiest weekend on the calendar back to the beach. The Dutch Grand Prix ends today. Not with a whimper, because this race never did anything quietly: the last edition got a sprint race, a sell-out crowd, and a Saturday won by George Russell while the home hero finished sixth and the stands stayed orange anyway. It deserves a proper goodbye, so here it is, corner by corner, year by year, with a long stop at the Tarzanbocht on the way. **A track built for the wrong reasons** Zandvoort was never supposed to be a racetrack. During the occupation, the Germans bulldozed a straight road through the dunes for victory parades, and after the war the Dutch looked at it and thought: that will do nicely. The Royal Dutch Motorcycle Association stitched the old military roads into a circuit, taking advice from Sammy Davis, a Bentley Boy who had won Le Mans in 1927\. The first race ran in 1950 and was won by Louis Rosier, who won it again in 1951\. Nobody had invented a world championship for it yet, but the dunes had found their purpose. The result is 4.259 km of rollercoaster, 14 corners threaded between the sand and the sea, with two of them banked at 18 degrees so the cars can be flung through the corners like balls in a roulette wheel. Turn 3, the Hugenholtzbocht, is named after Hans Hugenholtz, Zandvoort's first circuit director, who went on to design Suzuka and Hockenheim but, rather awkwardly, not the track that carries his corner's name. Turn 14, the Arie Luyendykbocht, is named after the two-time Indy 500 winner and used to be called Bos Uit, "out of the woods." Drivers used to say the Scheivlak was where "the heroes distinguish themselves from the regular drivers." The rest of the lap is where everybody else hangs on. **The corner called Tarzan** Every corner at Zandvoort has a name, and most have a story. Turn one has the best one. Legend says a man who lived just behind the fence at the edge of the corner, known to everyone simply as Tarzan, refused to give up his vegetable garden unless they named the corner after him. The circuit got its hairpin, the man got his immortality, and the deal has paid both sides handsomely ever since. For 70-odd years the Tarzanbocht has been the end of the straight, a 180-degree right-hander and the best overtaking spot on the lap, which in Formula 1 is another way of saying the scene of the best nonsense. The nonsense has been magnificent. In 1977 James Hunt and Mario Andretti touched wheels there and took each other out of the race. In 1979 Gilles Villeneuve, having already broken his suspension fighting Alan Jones, slid off at Tarzan, put his Ferrari into reverse in front of God and everybody, and drove the thing out of the mud with a wheel assembly that was about to explode into pieces. In 1982 Rene Arnoux crashed head-on into the barriers at the end of the pit straight, walked away, and made everyone who had seen it feel better about life. The corner has outlived them all. **The numbers, quickly** Thirty-eight races, every single one at Zandvoort, which makes it one of the most faithful relationships in motorsport: one venue, three layouts, seven decades. Jim Clark owns the place with four wins, 1963, 1964, 1965 and 1967, the last one from eighth on the grid in the Lotus 49 on the debut of the Cosworth DFV, an engine that went on to become one of the most successful in the sport's history. Jackie Stewart won three, including the 1973 race where he broke Clark's record for career victories. Niki Lauda won three, the last in 1985 by 0.232 seconds, the closest finish in the race's history, holding off his own McLaren teammate Alain Prost. It was Lauda's 25th and final Grand Prix win. Nobody knew it would be Zandvoort's last for 35 years. The rest of the winners' list reads like a world champions' roll call: Ascari, Fangio, Moss, Graham Hill, Brabham, Rindt, Hunt, Andretti, Piquet, Prost, and later Verstappen. Ferrari won eight times as a constructor, the most of any team; Ford-badged Cosworths won ten times as an engine. Fangio won by three tenths of a second in 1955\. Mario Andretti won by 0.32 in 1978, his final victory in F1\. Jo Bonnier won his only Grand Prix here, in 1959\. The track was unkind to nobody, and it was generous to almost everyone who was any good. **The strange stuff** The race has been cancelled more often than some drivers have won it. 1954: no money. 1956 and 1957: no money, courtesy of the Suez Crisis. 1972: the drivers simply refused to race, because the facilities were too old-fashioned, which may be the only time in history a circuit was considered too shabby for Formula 1 rather than the other way around. And when the plug was finally pulled after 1985, the circuit company went bust and half the track was sold to a bungalow park developer. Somewhere in Zandvoort there may still be a holiday chalet standing on the racing line, which is the most Dutch possible way to build housing. There is also a corner officially called Zonder Naam Bocht, Dutch for "the corner without a name." At a track where corners are named after vegetable gardeners, this feels like a missed opportunity. The track's response to criticism has always been the same: you don't like it, you haven't driven it. **The dark pages** A farewell in good conscience has to pause here. Death has touched this track more than once: a spectator in 1960, Piers Courage in 1970, Roger Williamson in 1973, when David Purley stopped his own car, ran across the track and tried to lift the burning March off his friend, alone, and was later awarded the George Medal for it. Jackie Stewart won that race and nobody felt like celebrating. The sport got safer because of places like this and the men who died at them. It feels right to remember why. **The orange years** Then a kid from Limburg changed everything. By 2019 Max Verstappen had made the Netherlands so unsafely orange that the Grand Prix came back, announced that May for 2020, delayed a year by COVID, and unleashed in 2021 on a crowd that had been waiting 36 years. It became the blueprint for the modern race weekend. The train from Amsterdam to Zandvoort was renamed the Max Express and ran every five minutes through the weekend. Roughly 300,000 people came over the three days and almost none of them arrived by car: they took the train or rode bicycles, and other promoters started flying to Zandvoort to learn how it was done. Martin Garrix DJ'd between sessions. In 2023 Andre Rieu conducted the national anthem while the stands waved flags into a giant Dutch flag. Zandvoort became the first Grand Prix with its own official song, "Lights Out" by the DJ known as La Fuente, played after the anthem from 2023 on. And the home boy won. 2021, 2022, 2023, three in a row, all from pole, making Verstappen the first Dutch driver ever to win his home race, 69 years after the championship first showed up. The 2023 edition was stopped for rain and ran for two hours and 24 minutes, the longest, wettest party of the era, and he won that one too. Lando Norris broke the streak in 2024\. Oscar Piastri won in 2025\. The home wins stopped. The party never did. **Why it has to end** None of it was enough, because the race was privately funded and the Dutch government never put a cent into it, and the promoter calculated that it took three sold-out weekends a year just to break even. One bad year would have wiped out years of good ones, so the risk stopped being worth taking. At the end of 2024 the decision was made: 2026 would be the final lap, as the race itself marketed it, going out on a high note. F1's boss Stefano Domenicali said Zandvoort had "raised the bar for European Grands Prix." Portugal and Turkey take the slot from next year. **The last weekend** This weekend gave the venue a farewell it deserved: the first Dutch Grand Prix with the sprint format, a Saturday sprint won by George Russell from Leclerc and Norris while Verstappen came sixth, and every grandstand sold out. Today's race is number 38 and the last one, at least for a while. The circuit itself isn't going anywhere. It has survived a war, two bankruptcies, a bungalow park, and a boycott by the drivers. It will survive this. The last time Zandvoort said goodbye, in 1985, nobody knew it was a goodbye. Lauda won his final race by a quarter of a second and the circus left, and it took one extraordinary driver and a million orange scarves to bring it back 35 years later. So I won't say goodbye properly. The Dutch don't either. Tot ziens, Zandvoort. See you later.