The circuit's origins are uncomfortable. Zandvoort had hosted minor street races in the town during the 1930s, but the straight road that became the spine of the eventual track was laid through the dunes during the German occupation, originally so that the Wehrmacht could hold victory parades along the coast. After the war the road was connected with other coastal defence access routes, and Dutch organisers stitched together a racing circuit. The first Dutch Grand Prix ran in 1950 as a non-championship event and entered the Formula One World Championship two years later, in 1952. In its first decades it was a stage for the great names of the sport: Fangio dominating with Mercedes in 1955, Stirling Moss winning in a Vanwall in 1958, Jim Clark taking three straight victories from 1963 to 1965.

Zandvoort earned a brutal reputation in the 1970s. In 1970, the Briton Piers Courage was killed when a wheel came off his de Tomaso near the high-speed Tunnel Oost corner; the car caught fire with him still inside. In 1973, the British rookie Roger Williamson, in only his second Formula One race, crashed at the same corner. He was not badly injured by the impact, but his car overturned and caught fire, and he could not free himself from it. His countryman David Purley stopped his own car, ran across the track, and tried alone to right Williamson's overturned March. The marshals on duty had no flame-retardant overalls. They did not help. Race control assumed the crashed car was Purley's, that he had safely climbed out, and let the race run on at full pace. Williamson died of asphyxiation while Purley wrestled with the wreckage. Purley was later awarded the George Medal for his attempt to save him; Jackie Stewart won the race; no one celebrated. After 1985, when the local promoter CENAV went bankrupt and the circuit lost half its land to a bungalow park, F1 left and many quietly expected it would never come back.

The plan to return to Zandvoort took shape during the 2010s, after a generation had passed and Formula One under new ownership began actively courting historic venues. The proximate trigger was Max Verstappen, the Belgian-born Dutchman with a Dutch racing licence who in 2015 became Formula One's youngest-ever driver at seventeen and, by 2019, a regular race winner. Dutch fans were filling away grandstands in orange wherever he raced. On 14 May 2019 Formula One announced the Dutch Grand Prix would return to the calendar. The circuit had to be reworked for modern car widths and safety standards. The most striking change was the rebuilding of two corners as banked turns: Hugenholtzbocht at Turn 3 and the final Arie Luyendyk corner, both engineered with substantial banking that allowed multiple racing lines and side-by-side overtaking. The pandemic delayed the comeback by a year. The first modern Dutch Grand Prix finally ran in 2021.

Max Verstappen won the 2021 race, the first Dutch Grand Prix in thirty-six years, in front of a stadium of orange. He won again in 2022. He won again in 2023, the race that gave Formula One its first official soundtrack, La Fuente's Lights Out, played after the national anthem before the formation lap. His streak of poles and victories at Zandvoort, three for three since the revival, was broken in 2024 when McLaren's Lando Norris took pole and won the race outright. By then Verstappen had become a four-time world champion and the dominant figure of his generation, and the Dutch Grand Prix had become one of the noisiest, most chaotically affectionate home crowds anywhere on the calendar. Orange flares burned in the dunes from Friday morning to Sunday evening. The campsites filled with people who would never have travelled to a Grand Prix without the gravitational pull of a Dutchman winning.

And now, again, the race is leaving. On 4 December 2024 the local promoter announced it would not seek to extend its contract beyond 2026. The economic case had become harder: a Dutch summer race competes against a packed European tourism market, F1's hosting fees keep rising, and the local infrastructure simply cannot expand much further within the protected dune landscape. The 2026 Dutch Grand Prix will be the last under the current contract, and there is no successor lined up. The circuit will remain, of course. It hosts touring car series, club days, vintage events. But for Formula One, the second life of the Dutch Grand Prix is ending almost as suddenly as it began, defined almost entirely by the career arc of one driver who turned a dormant track in the North Sea dunes into one of the loudest crowds the sport had heard in decades.