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Both Red Bull and McLaren arrive at the Italian Grand Prix with important questions to answer that will decide the outcome of both Formula 1 championships.
Zandvoort provided another twist in the tale with McLaren dominating the weekend. But what can we expect from a very different circuit, Monza, and what does each team need to work on?
Has Red Bull retained a key advantage?
Recency bias may sway you into thinking McLaren's untouchable and Max Verstappen's recalcitrant Red Bull has never looked so far from winning in this rules era.
Without an engine failure earlier in the year, though, Verstappen and Red Bull would have won the final race before the summer break. Comfortably. Because, just recently, the RB20 was the quickest car at Spa.
That doesn't change the overriding narrative that McLaren's in the ascendancy and Red Bull's on the back foot but it does mean there are still circumstances where the Red Bull will be faster. And we might have another such race this weekend.
Red Bull's superior aero efficiency was behind Verstappen's dominant Spa qualifying performance and would have been key to winning if he didn't have a grid penalty. It will play a role again at Monza, although admittedly the situation is slightly different given every team will be maxing out their low-downforce packages there.
McLaren is making progress with its aero efficiency, and Monza will be a big test of how potent it can be in extreme circumstances. It was weak last season - but then again, a year ago it was weak at the kind of corners that made it so dominant last weekend.
That makes it tricky to judge but, right now, McLaren believes it needs more upgrades to have Zandvoort-level pace everywhere.
"Thanks to the upgrades now we will be more competitive even where Red Bull were faster than us potentially," said McLaren team principal Andrea Stella.
"In a way we missed the opportunity to see in Belgium who would have been the fastest car in dry conditions. But we think that the car in the current configuration is possibly not enough in terms of the performance required to be the best car at every single event.
"That's why we plan to deliver more upgrades before the end of the season." - Scott Mitchell-Malm
Does Red Bull have a short-term fix?
Zandvoort was an unusual event for Red Bull, with Verstappen opting to run the start-of-season floor and Sergio Perez a newer version. The team reckoned Perez's configuration was a couple of tenths quicker, but Verstappen's balance troubles led him down that path.
The unusual Zandvoort experiments prove Red Bull is uncertain about its development direction, but there's also a positive. Significant data will have been gathered that can be fed into the ongoing development of the RB20, as well as influencing the direction of next year's RB21, and that will be valuable.
Red Bull hasn't become an incompetent team overnight and the real-world knowledge built at Zandvoort could be invaluable down the line.
So what does it mean for Monza? Not a great deal insofar as you can't turn around any significant new designs in a few days, although it is possible it might influence decisions made on introducing parts already far down the pipeline.
Most likely, the main impact will be Red Bull getting its cars back to the same spec, most likely using the floor Perez used (below, right).
Monza is, on paper, a good opportunity for Red Bull. It still has a very aerodynamically efficient car and the track configuration and conditions are simpler than those at Zandvoort. While that doesn't necessarily mean a return to dominant form, it should at least be stronger than it was in the Netherlands. That plus the Verstappen factor could well put it in strong victory contention.
With Baku and Singapore coming up, Monza will be an opportunity Red Bull is determined to make the most of. But it's likely we'll have to wait longer for any kind of game-changing upgrade. - Edd Straw
When will McLaren fix a key weakness?
As Norris bogged down and lost the lead to Verstappen at the start of the Dutch GP, it seemed to confirm the worst theories about his main emerging weakness this season.
Norris has lost the lead all three times he's started on pole in a grand prix this season. Four, if you include his wasted sprint race pole in China.
But at Zandvoort, it quickly became clear that team-mate Oscar Piastri got an equally poor getaway. So was it the drivers? Did McLaren get its start mapping wrong? Is there one consistent cause or multiple underperforming factors in this trend of sub-optimal McLaren starts?
Although the pace advantage at Zandvoort meant Norris could ultimately recover the lost track position with ease, McLaren can't count on that everywhere. It cost the team something tangible in the Dutch GP - Piastri didn't regain the ground he lost, so that was a missed double podium and probable one-two - and it could bite again at every other race.
That's why Stella has admitted there is a "wider theme" around start performance and called it "a priority for the future of McLaren". The question is whether that can be improved in time for this weekend.
"We do have to look very carefully into the details about why our competitors seem to gain a little bit on us," he said.
"Statistically over the course of the season we are competitive from a launch point of view. But we see that there are some cars, like Verstappen for instance, who seem to be performing very well at the [second phase of the] start.
"Definitely we have to look into this. This comes from the driver in terms of their launch procedure execution. And it comes from a team point of view because there are some aspects which are under teams' control.
"We need to look into what kind of optimisation we are able to do." - SMM
Can McLaren beat Verstappen with both cars?
Norris's chances of closing the 70-point gap to Verstappen are slim but, if McLaren retains a Zandvoort-like advantage over Red Bull, the need to gain roughly eight points per weekend doesn't look quite so ridiculous.
If that long shot is to have any chance, McLaren needs to make sure Piastri is up there taking points off Verstappen as well. Had Piastri claimed the second place McLaren felt was possible last weekend, then Norris would have made an 11-point gain rather than eight.
This isn't a Perez-like situation for McLaren as, unlike Red Bull's number two, Piastri has the pace to be up there. But both driver and team will need to be faultless in their execution to make sure there aren't more "missed opportunities" (to quote Stella) in the coming races.
Over the last 10 races, McLaren only managed to beat Verstappen with both cars twice, in Monaco and Hungary. Perez's underperformance means things look good for the constructors' title already, but McLaren needs to up that rate considerably over the rest of the season if it wants to give Norris a real shot at hunting down Verstappen.
And as Piastri has proven he is capable of beating Norris sometimes too, that could become very useful if there are any weekends where he can beat Verstappen even when Norris can't.
What's clear is that Mercedes and Ferrari will continue to have an impact on the points battle. Only once this season have Red Bull and McLaren collectively filled the podium - in the Chinese GP, while it also happened in the Miami sprint. That shows just how big an effect those teams are having on the title fight... Glenn Freeman
Where the interlopers fit in
The championship battle is all about Red Bull versus McLaren but, as Glenn points out, Mercedes and Ferrari both have a big role to play in this fight.
At Zandvoort, unexpectedly it was Ferrari that took points off both McLaren and Red Bull thanks to its strong race pace, while Mercedes was in a position to do so but for problems with tyre degradation.
The temptation is to assume McLaren's Zandvoort form means it will continue to be unbeatable, but while it's surely going to be a victory threat everywhere it would be a mistake to take last weekend as representative of a new normal.
There will be tracks where McLaren has that kind of advantage, but it won't be that way at all of them. That's why Mercedes and Ferrari have the potential to be key players in the points swings that will decide the championship. And both could well be a factor at low-downforce Monza. - ES
