THE LAST LAP: HOW A DUNE CIRCUIT WITH NO GOVERNMENT MONEY REWROTE F1'S RULEBOOK.
- Veronica Slipstream
- 5 days ago
- 9 min read
And Why It’s Walking Away Anyway
THE DAILY ENGINE
AUGUST 20, 2026
Urban planning, ownership drama,
and one very Dutch exit
Editor's Note: A quick note before we get into it. This piece exists because De Boordradio sat Robert van Overdijk down, on-site, mid-construction, and just let him talk for an hour instead of cutting him off after the third usable soundbite. No press release, no six-outlet-by-lunchtime recycled quote, just someone asking a circuit director about shower epiphanies and stikstof lawsuits and having the patience to let him actually answer. It genuinely got me a little fired up, in the way good radio occasionally still manages to. This is what F1 media needs more of: real people, real stories, told by people who bothered to show up. So, credit where it’s due: goed gedaan, Boordradio. Now if only every paddock reporter would take the hint and put the microphone down for longer than four seconds.
This August, Formula 1 pulls into Zandvoort for the sixth time since 2021, and for the last time, period. No rotation deal, no “see you in a couple of years,” no asterisk. The organizers made that decision themselves, on purpose, while the party was still good. If you know anything about how the Dutch generally handle a good party, that alone should tell you something is off. We don’t usually leave early.
Here is the thing about Zandvoort that gets lost in the orange smoke: it was never actually about the racing. It was a logistics project wearing a racing suit.
— Trudy Giordano
A circuit built by people who could not park a car
Start with the part that should have been impossible. Zandvoort sits wedged between a village, a beach, and one of the most heavily protected dune ecosystems in the country, home to natterjack toads and sand lizards that, it turns out, have better lawyers than most small businesses. There was no room to widen anything, which, to be fair, describes most of the Netherlands: a nation of 17 million people arranged on a floodplain the size of a large parking lot, where every square meter has already been claimed by a cow, a cyclist, or a committee. So when circuit director Robert van Overdijk and his team went looking for a way to make overtaking possible on a track that was, structurally, too short and too narrow for modern F1 cars, they couldn't do what every other circuit does and pour more asphalt into a field. They had a beach on one side and an environmental court case waiting on the other.
The fix, as van Overdijk tells it, came from track manager Niek Oude Luttikhuis, reportedly in the shower, wrestling with a G-force problem that fourteen or fifteen other layout options hadn't solved. His answer: don't lengthen the straight, bank the corner. Which is, when you think about it long enough, basically the moment someone in Dutch civil engineering finally remembered that "up" is also a direction the track could go. A country that spent centuries reclaiming land from the sea rather than simply learning to swim was always going to get there eventually.
The result is the Arie Luyendijk corner, tilted at 18 degrees, which functionally adds over 300 meters of flat-out running without moving a single dune. It is, genuinely, one of the cleverer pieces of civil engineering F1 has produced this decade, and it exists because a small Dutch circuit couldn’t afford to think the way bigger, richer circuits get to think. Necessity, meet a very expensive mother.
The rebuild that followed the layout decision is its own small miracle of scheduling: contractors reportedly executed the physical construction- tunnels, banked corners, widened straights- in roughly four months, while simultaneously fighting the Dutch nitrogen crisis for permits and then, for good measure, a global pandemic. If you ever want to see Dutch “we’ll figure it out” energy pushed to its structural limit, this was it.
The mobility plan is the real headline, and almost nobody outside logistics circles noticed
Here’s the sentence that should have made international news and mostly didn’t: Zandvoort, for three days a year, functionally bans cars. Not discourages. Bans. Only residents and accredited staff may drive in. Everyone else, up to 300,000 visitors across a weekend, arrives by bike, train, coach, or foot, routed through a tiered system of “park & bike” and “park & ride” hubs up to 15 kilometers out, with NS running a train into Zandvoort roughly every five minutes during the race weekend. By 2023, the province reported that 98% of visitors arrived by a sustainable method: half by public transport, 30% by bike, 14% by coach, and 4% on foot. This isn't sustainability marketing bolted onto a car race. It's survival logistics: a village that physically cannot absorb the traffic, solving the problem because the alternative was gridlock on a two-lane coastal road.
De Volkskrant's own transport experts, reviewing the original 2019 cycling plan, called it "interesting" and "ambitious," which in Dutch understatement is roughly the emotional equivalent of standing ovation.
Who actually owns this thing, and who just quietly cashes out
This is where it gets properly interesting, and where most fan coverage stops looking. Zandvoort is not publicly owned. It was bought in 2016 by Prince Bernhard van Oranje, an actual minor royal and serious rally driver, together with business partner Menno de Jong, through their holding company Chapman Andretti Partners, for what was reportedly a modest sum at the time. Van Oranje was personally involved in courting F1’s return. By 2024, that bet had paid off handsomely: the holding company’s retained profit for the year alone was over €6 million, pushing total equity past €17 million.
And then, approximately two weeks before writing this piece, van Oranje sold out entirely. Not just the circuit, everything: the Hilversum media park stake, the IT company, the property portfolio, all offloaded to his remaining partners so he can, in his own words, redirect his energy toward artificial intelligence investments. He is walking away from Zandvoort roughly the same summer Zandvoort is walking away from Formula 1. Whether that's poetic or just well-timed is your call.
Side note, because we'd be lying if we pretended not to notice: this liquidation tour lands a few months after his divorce from Princess Annette, ending a 25-year marriage, was announced, at a point where Dutch outlets were already doing napkin math on what a roughly 280-building portfolio might cost him in a split. It also arrives conveniently downwind of years of "pandjesprins" headlines over housing violations and a certain snack bar eviction that did not read well on the page. "The mission is accomplished" is one way to describe selling everything at once. "Excellent timing on several fronts simultaneously" is another.
The sponsors, or: how a workwear brand ended up on the pit wall
The naming rights history alone is a small case study in brand opportunism. Heineken has anchored the race title throughout, unsurprising for a Dutch brewer with deep F1 pockets. But the circuit’s own name has been rented out twice: CM.com bought the naming rights in 2020 as part of what van Overdijk called the track’s “digital transformation,” stepped back after 2023, and by mid-2025 the circuit had rebranded again, this time as MASCOT Circuit Zandvoort, courtesy of a Danish workwear company that dresses the circuit’s 1,500-plus event staff. There’s something quietly very Dutch about the idea that the most emotionally resonant motorsport comeback story in a generation is currently sponsored, corner by corner, by the people who make the polo shirts.
Government money: real, but a rounding error next to the competition
Van Overdijk’s repeated public line that Zandvoort receives essentially no government subsidy, unlike most Grade 1 venues, checks out on the numbers. The state, province, and municipality together invested roughly €7 million in rail upgrades ahead of the 2020 return, and Zandvoort later shared in a broader €20 million regional livability package that wasn’t specifically an F1 subsidy. Compare that to reported annual state injections in the tens of millions at Gulf circuits, and Zandvoort’s position starts to look less like Dutch thriftiness and more like genuine structural disadvantage. Three sold-out days a year isn’t a business model so much as a tightrope, and van Overdijk has said as much directly: a one-off dip in attendance is survivable, a structural one is not.
Two directors, two very different jobs
It’s worth separating the circuit’s two public faces, because they’re doing different work. Van Overdijk is the balance-sheet brain: permits, contracts, financial risk modeling, 38 wins in 38 court cases against the circuit itself, as of 2022. Jan Lammers, the Zandvoort-born former F1 driver and Le Mans winner, was brought in as sporting director specifically to serve as the fan-facing bridge, and he’s been candid that he privately doubted the whole project was possible. Lammers has consistently pushed back on the idea that local resistance ever really came from Zandvoort itself, arguing the town’s pride at sitting alongside Monaco and Las Vegas on the calendar outweighs the grumbling, most of which, by his account, comes from outside the village boundaries.
The reaction the international press actually cared about
Here's the funny part: almost none of the above made it into the global coverage. What traveled was the Orange Army, and specifically the sheer, slightly alarming scale of it. The Daily Mirror called it one of the best atmospheres in recent F1 history. Zandvoort itself changed the local speed limit signs from "30" to "33" in honor of Verstappen's car number, an official touch that's either inspired place-branding or marketing with a completely straight face. The flares got so enthusiastic that circuit security reportedly had to tighten entry checks specifically over orange smoke. Christian Horner, never a man short of a soundbite, said the atmosphere had been like being in a nightclub for three days. Take that as a compliment or a liability disclosure; Horner didn't specify which.
At home, the reviews are less uniform than the flares suggest
Not everyone in the neighborhood was cheering. A 2023 Breda University study found that roughly 80% of Zandvoort residents were proud to host the race, rating the weekend an average of 8.1. But the noise didn’t respect municipal borders. Residents as far as Haarlem and the Ramplaankwartier complained the racket carried on the southwest wind and sounded, in one memorable phrase, like a swarm of genetically modified wasps. And in the strangest twist of the whole saga, the environmental groups who've spent years losing the fight over the circuit's own permit specifically, van Overdijk's claimed 38-for-38 record, aren't celebrating the exit either. It hasn't been a clean sweep everywhere: Rust bij de Kust separately won a 2023 ruling against the municipality over how race-weekend noise gets measured. Rust bij de Kust’s Karel van Broekhoven told NH Nieuws he’s actually worried, because the Grand Prix gave him a media hook to complain about noise. Without it, nobody’s watching what happens next under a new permit that allows music events up to 85 decibels in the dunes. Sometimes your enemy is also your best publicist, and losing him is its own kind of problem.
So why leave at the top
Van Overdijk’s official answer is that ending it “at its peak” beats waiting for the shine to wear off, and there’s a certain steely Dutch pragmatism to that, the same instinct that put a train every five minutes into a village of 17,000 people rather than pretend the roads would cope. But read the financials, and it looks less like romantic timing and more like a circuit that ran the numbers on subsidy-free racing against state-funded competitors in the Gulf and decided the math stops working eventually. It’s less “we’re leaving on a high note” and more “we did the spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet had opinions.”
Either way, this August, watch the trains, not just the cars. The real engineering marvel at Zandvoort was never really the banked corner. It was getting 300,000 people in and out of a beach town with two narrow roads, for six years running, without anyone driving in at all. That’s the part nobody’s going to remember once the orange smoke clears for the last time, and it’s the part actually worth mourning.
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