Stuck behind crush barriers, at the entrance of the circuit, fans are already waiting for him around 09:00 on Friday morning. His first name is heard from all sides in the paddock as he begins the journey from team building to garage. There is not a place on the Zandvoort circuit where Max Verstappen is not reminded this weekend that he is driving a home race. But is there such a thing as home advantage in Formula 1?
In any case, Verstappen is doing his best in Zandvoort not to do anything different than at other races. His team Red Bull has deliberately not saddled him with extra media or sponsorship obligations, in order to make the weekend as normal as possible for him. This way he can fully focus on racing.
The main character cannot escape the madness around the Dutch GP, as it turns out on Thursday. In the morning, on departure from Monaco, he is told that he is expected in ‘neat clothes’ in a hotel in Amsterdam. There he is then surprised by sports minister Helder, who appoints him an officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau in front of friends and family.
bodyguards
He then leaves for Zandvoort under a police escort. Unlike on other tracks, he will be flanked by bodyguards this weekend. “Because there are a few more people walking around who want something from you,” Verstappen says when asked about the 110,000 spectators that the GP attracts every day.
He looks sober at racing in front of his own audience. In his own words, it does not cause him much extra stress. “You know that everyone expects you to win here just like that, but of course it’s not that easy. In the end, you can only do your best. That’s the only thing you can check. So I don’t see the disadvantage, but I don’t see the advantage either’, says Verstappen.
He knows that sometimes a driver in a mechanical sport is simply powerless. His first training on Friday, for example, immediately put a damper on the fans: after seven laps in front of the full, orange stands his gearbox gave out.
Although Verstappen sees no advantage or disadvantage in racing for his own audience, home advantage in the sport is no fiction. Scientists have been researching it for decades. At least in team sports, the home teams benefit from playing in their own stadiums.
A British sports scientist bundled together with a statistician in 1999 already reviewed the scientific literature on home advantage. In their article, they concluded that many suspected reasons for home advantage had little effect in practice. As examples they mentioned the disadvantage of traveling for the away team or the advantage of playing in a familiar environment for the home team,
Effect supporters
Audience was left as the factor with the most impact. It was only difficult to draw conclusions about the exact effect of supporters on the performance of the athletes. According to the scientists, the effect of the audience on the referee’s decisions was more visible and therefore also the most important factor in home advantage: ‘Because only two or three crucial decisions need to fall the other way to give the home team the upper hand’.
The question is to what extent that aspect of home advantage can be applied to Formula 1. Because of the helmet on his head, which dampens just about all the ambient noise, Max Verstappen does not hear the encouragement from the stands. Referees in Formula 1 are tucked away in an office on the track. They hardly get anything from the atmosphere on the track, so that they can hardly be influenced on paper.
At the same time, home advantage can be paralyzing, according to research by two American psychologists from 2005. The researchers made a distinction: yelling fans can have a positive effect in sports where effort can be decisive for success. On the contrary, it can be disadvantageous if an athlete needs all his focus to perform a complex action. The fear of making mistakes overshadows the will to be successful. That’s when things go wrong. Especially with, as the researchers write, ‘inner processes that normally take place through an automatic, learned, unconscious execution’.
In short: due to the pressure of the home crowd, athletes suddenly start thinking about automatisms that they normally never think about. Driving a Formula 1 car can be described as such an automatism, in the case of Verstappen perfected by a combination of racing instinct and many hours of training. In order to perform optimally, he must have as little on his mind as possible. In racing, the difference between a perfect and a wasted lap is often a few centimeters. A percent less concentration at 300 kilometers per hour can be disastrous.
Bad home score in F1
That ‘adverse’ side of racing for the home crowd seems to predominate in Formula 1, judging by the statistics. Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen, for example, are the only two drivers to have won home races since 2015. A journalist for sports site Bleacher Report analyzed all the performance of Formula 1 drivers in home races in 2014 over a period of ten years, between 2003 and 2013. The outcome? Drivers finished on average half a position lower in their home race than at other GPs.
The research of the American psychologists emphasizes that the effect of the pressure of a home game can differ per athlete. It may be the explanation for the differing opinions about home advantage in Formula 1. For example, single world champion Nigel Mansell, a favorite of British racing fans for years, noted in his autobiography that racing on his home track made him ‘a second per lap’. Seven-time champion Michael Schumacher said at his last in Germany in 2012, that in his eyes there was no real home advantage. “But a home race feeling.”
Australian Daniel Ricciardo invariably looked up to racing in ‘his’ Melbourne. He felt he couldn’t disappoint anyone from fans to media, making racing an afterthought. He can now deal with that pressure better, he told the Australian newspaper at the beginning of this year The Age. But it will never become completely normal: ‘So you will always have to find a compromise between either doing everything or shutting down completely’.
As a Finn, two-time world champion Mika Häkkinen never had a home race in Formula 1. Was that a disadvantage or an advantage? “Well, I’ve lived in Monaco for thirty years. Finland is my home country, but Monaco is my home, so it always felt a bit like my home race,” Häkkinen says of the race he won once. “And when I raced in Hungary, a lot of Finns came there. So that also felt a bit like a home race. It always made me feel really good. I experienced it as positive pressure. You have to absorb that energy.’ According to him, that mindset also determines the difference between a driver who fights for titles and a driver who does not get further than filling the field in the premier class.
Greatest drivers excel at home
From that point of view, it is no coincidence that the greatest drivers of the past also often excelled on their home tracks. Lewis Hamilton (seven titles) won eight times at Silverstone, Michael Schumacher (seven titles) won nine times in Germany and Alain Prost (four titles) won six times in France.
And Max Verstappen was therefore successful on his first attempt in Zandvoort last year, on the return of the Dutch GP after more than three decades. He acknowledged in an interview with Ziggo Sport, a few days after winning the world title, that the race had caused more turmoil in his head than he did during that weekend. “When I got over the line, I was like, ‘Pff, it’s done,'” he said.
According to him, that had a large part to do with the course of the season: Verstappen was under pressure from Mercedes and had to win in Zandvoort to keep track of the title. This year, the title pressure is considerably less, given his generous lead of almost a hundred points in the World Cup standings.
It doesn’t mean he’s suddenly thinking about something like home advantage. It says something about the stoic mentality of the upcoming multiple F1 champion: ‘Because I don’t care if I’m at home or somewhere else,’ says Verstappen. ‘I wouldn’t know why that should be either. Because if you say that before you start, it’s all wrong, right? I don’t believe in those kinds of things. If you know what to do, in any sport, it doesn’t matter where you are.’