The F1 championship comes to Zandvoort for the Dutch GP after a critical and polemic weekend where racing at Spa-Francorchamps was deemed impossible and poorly handled by the high commands at the track.

McLaren Team Principal Andreas Seidl talked about the events that happened in Belgium ahead of this week’s race in the Netherlands and began assuring that, the incident that involved Lando Norris crashing into the barriers at the beginning of Q3 was pretty expensive in terms of damage costs for McLaren: "I would say several hundred thousand pounds in the end, collectively.”

"But thanks to the preparation beforehand, from these crashes, and the great work back home in the factory in production in the last weeks, we are still in a healthy position when it comes to spare parts as well."

It was a dramatic Saturday at Spa, in our first qualifying session after the 2021 summer break ⏱

Watch highlights here - including this incident that Lando thankfully walked away from, and a battle for pole that was decided by 0.013s ⬇️#BelgianGP 🇧🇪 #F1

— Formula 1 (@F1) August 28, 2021

Before the shunt at Eau Rouge and the incident in Hungary when Valtteri Bottas took him out of the race, the McLaren of Lando Norris was the only one out of the twenty cars on the grid to finish every single race so far. Seidl was questioned in which state the Mercedes PU on the McLaren #4 was left after the major hit under the rain last Sunday.

"It's still open when to use it again. The power unit has been checked in detail and looks to be okay, and will be used at one of the next race weekends.”

"Everything so far looks good, but as always, in the end, you only get the final green light once you have reinstalled the unit again and go back on track.”

"We were lucky, in terms of the angle of the initial impact, that it was not that bad. That's why we could keep the monocoque and also the damage to the power unit was not as bad as it looked when the crash happened.

"That's also the reason why Lando could walk away in the end without any serious issues."

The German took the chance and also talked his mind about how the three-laps-under-safety-car long-race and the situation with the forecast that did not give in to F1 could have been handled when the Grand Circus was in Belgium.

"On the points side, there is definitely something that should be learned from what happened last weekend."

“Michael [Masi] already asked the teams to send back feedback of how we think the situation could be improved.”

“Then it would also avoid this discussion of the laps being done to get a classification or not. From my point of view, rewarding points for a qualifying result, if the race doesn’t happen, is something I could imagine is introduced and still be fair because it is the last point where you had a fair competition between all competitors.”

“So why not give a reward for that if the race cannot happen? It’s the same as qualifying not happening and then you take the free practice result. I think that’s something which hopefully can be better.”

“At the same time you have to accept with the regulations in place we have to cover a lot of different scenarios, and last Sunday was a lot of different scenarios - and together - that in the end were handled within the rules from the FIA side,” Seidl concluded.

Learning the ropes at the Circuit Zandvoort for the #DutchGP. 🇳🇱

Check out the team’s report from today’s practice sessions. 👇

— McLaren (@McLarenF1) September 3, 2021