There’s still a third of the Formula 1 season to run, but the final eight rounds will rush at the title protagonists.
Abu Dhabi looms barely two months on the horizon.
But we won’t need to wait even that long to hand out the first championship of the season.
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The constructors title is within reach for McLaren. With Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris splitting 12 wins from 16 rounds between them, Woking could fly out of Azerbaijan as the back-to-back teams champion — assuming certain conditions are met.
The maths is certainly in McLaren’s favour, but as Norris’s retirement in Zandvoort and Max Verstappen’s shock domination of Italy demonstrated, this season still capable of generating a twist.
CAN McLAREN MAKE HISTORY AGAIN?
The Azerbaijan Grand Prix is already the scene of history for McLaren.
Last year, off the back of Piastri’s tremendous victory and Norris’s ferocious comeback from 15th on the grid to fourth at the flag, McLaren ascended to top spot on the constructors championship table for the first time in a decade.
The Woking funk had been snapped. The historic British marque was an F1 leader again.
But even that impressive 10-year statistic undersells the drought.
McLaren had previously been on top of the standings at the end of the 2014 Australian Grand Prix, when Kevin Magnussen and Jenson Button were classified second and third, but that result was an aberration in an underwhelming car. McLaren lost the lead at the following race and finished the season fifth.
The last time the team was representatively first on the table was after the 2012 Chinese Grand Prix. McLaren lost the lead to Red Bull Racing at the next race but remained in close contention until after the European campaign before eventually finishing third.
And the last time the team had actually won the championship? That would be 1998, more than a quarter-century earlier.
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That McLaren should have topped the standings at this point last year was remarkable considering how strongly Red Bull Racing had started the season before fading hard, and it was doubly so for how uncompetitive the team was just a year earlier.
Perhaps triply remarkable, then, is that McLaren isn’t just leading the championship this year, it’s walking it.
Woking has more than double the score of second-placed Ferrari and has its first match point this weekend.
If it can outscore Ferrari by at least nine points and prevent Mercedes and Red Bull Racing from gaining form-defying swing in their favour, McLaren will win back-to-back constructors championships.
With seven rounds remaining after this weekend, doing so would make it the earliest title winner in Formula 1 history, eclipsing even Red Bull Racing’s almost perfect 2023 season.
“It’s an event which still holds special relevance for us,” McLaren boss Andrea Stella said. “While competition remains close with multiple teams contending for victories, we remain focused on own performance and feel well prepared for the weekend ahead.”
It’s a track that will suit McLaren better than Monza, with the set-up compromise required between the long straights and the twisty middle sector giving the team much more room to play with the strengths of its car.
But there’s one driver who will almost certainly threaten to rain on McLaren’s coronation day.
Piastri praised for pit blunder reaction | 02:00
CAN CHARLES LECLERC AVENGE FOUR YEARS OF PAIN?
There’s a strong argument to make that Charles Leclerc is the fastest driver in Formula 1 today.
The Monegasque has 27 pole positions, putting him 11th on the list of the sport’s best qualifiers.
Four of those poles were scored in Baku.
There’s something that just clicks for Leclerc around the Azerbaijani capital.
It’s a track the demands a set-up compromise for the super-long front straight and the twisty middle sector. The less downforce applied, the faster the lap time, but that makes the car skittish through the plentiful slow corners. A driver not totally at ease with that set-up will lack the confidence to put the power down, costing precious lap time.
Leclerc, though, has never looked anything other than supremely at one with this track no matter the quality of his machinery.
It’s something that baffles even him.
“This I don’t know,” he said last year when asked why he’s so consistently good in Baku. “I don’t really have a strong answer to it.
“I guess it just goes with my driving style very naturally.
“Most of the time you have to work a lot to try and gain lap time, but I just feel good with the rhythm of this track for some reason, and that makes it a particularly good track for me.”
But Baku is representative of Leclerc in more ways than one.
He’s extremely quick here, with more poles in Azerbaijan than at any other track.
But he’s also failed to convert any of those poles to victory. He’s never won in Baku.
That bizarre statistic extends even to the sprint in 2021, for which he also took pole but then failed to claim victory.
His Baku record over the last four year reads: fourth, DNF, third, second.
That’s a very Leclerc sort of statistic.
He’s converted just five of his 27 pole positions into wins. He’s won just one of his last 16 starts from P1.
This is the strong argument for Leclerc being the fastest driver in F1. Over a single lap he’s able to mask his car’s shortcomings, pushing his machinery to its limit. But it’s much harder to work around those limitations over a grand prix distance. Inevitably he fades to a position more reflective of his car.
That truth is at its most painful in Baku, where he’s been so, so fast over the years.
Last year he got close. His Ferrari was the fastest race car, but Piastri’s spectacular dive-bomb and iron-willed defensive drive ensured that speed couldn’t be flexed.
Leclerc is almost guaranteed to be a pole contender this weekend. Will this be the year he finally converts?
Oscar & Leclerc laugh after absurd move | 00:54
WILL McLAREN TAKE ITS HANDS OFF THE WHEEL OF THE TITLE FIGHT?
There’s something familiar about the context of McLaren’s arrival in Baku.
This time last year conversation was dominated by a controversial call regarding the so-called papaya rules — the policies governing how Piastri and Norris raced each other.
McLaren was slowly coming to the conclusion that Norris had to be backed as the number one driver to boost his slim hopes of overhauling Verstappen for the championship, and in Baku the team revealed it would give the Briton priority in certain situations.
Ironically Piastri ended up dominating the weekend, with Norris at one stage deployed to slow down Sergio Pérez to help his teammate win the race.
The context of this year’s race is remarkably similar.
The conversation is being dominated by a controversial call regarding those same papaya rules, the background being the team’s decision to force Piastri to hand second place back to Norris after the Briton suffered a slow pit stop late in the race.
The background to that moment is McLaren wanting to play as neutral a hand as possible.
Ironically it ended up looking interventionist and too keen to micromanage a championship battle already accused of lacking emotion.
Both drivers played down any controversy after the race, and speaking in Baku, Piastri was keen to keep the incident in his rear-view mirrors.
“We’ve had good discussions with the team,” he said. “Obviously it was a highly talked about moment.
“We’ve had a lot of discussions, clarified a lot of things, and we know how we’re going to go racing going forward, which is the most important thing.
“What’s happened is done, and I’m excited to go racing again.”
But he appeared to hint that post-Italy debrief had led the team to adopt less of an interventionist approach to similar situations.
Asked whether the team would be more hands off once the constructors championship is sealed, Piastri said: “Not necessarily because of the constructors championship, but I think, again, we’ve had a lot of discussions about how we want to go racing.
“A lot of that is to stay for us because if we give out that information, then we become very easy targets to pick off because everyone knows what we’re going to do.
“It’s all very aligned with all of us, but it stays in-house.”
While it’s highly unlikely McLaren will find itself in the same situation again, the fact Piastri and Norris are so closely matched at the front of the field means it’s inevitable their races and strategies will intersect again.
For the most part McLaren has allowed its drives free rein, though with some clear guardrails to maintain what it believes constitute racing fairness.
It remains to be seen how — or whether — the concept of ‘fair’ has been tweaked since Italy.
But Piastri was crystal clear about one thing.
After days of speculation among punters that McLaren is favouring Norris’s title bid, Piastri put his position beyond doubt.
“We have enough freedom to control our own destiny in the championship,” he said.
Piastri forced to give second place up | 01:18
CAN RED BULL RACING’S REVIVAL CONTINUE?
There was considerable optimism at Red Bull Racing after Verstappen won the Italian Grand Prix, but it wasn’t simply about the result.
The fact the Dutchman had been able to dominate Monza at all one year after the team flopped at the same circuit — and amid a year that’s badly underperforming relative to expectations — represented a marked upturn in form.
Some in the team believed that upturn isn’t circumstantial.
“Up until now we’ve had a lot of races where we were just shooting left and right a little bit with the set-up of the car,” Verstappen said. “They were quite extreme changes, which shows that we were not in control. We were not fully understanding what to do.
“With Laurent [Mekies, new team principal] having an engineering background, he’s asking the right questions to the engineers — commonsense questions — so I think that works really well.”
Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko was of the same opinion.
The subtext was clear: the team is thriving in the post-Christian Horner era.
Undoubtedly the change in management has had an effect. Mekies is bringing a different approach to preparing for each weekend. Given Red Bull Racing has so often found itself boxed into a set-up corner, having an engineer at the helm of the team is sure to pay dividends.
But it’s a stretch to say the substitution of a single figure can turn around a thousand-strong team and an intricately complex car, never mind in less than two months.
In Monza, for example, the team benefited from development choices set in motion with Horner in the chair immediately after last year’s race. Mekies’s team made the most of those decisions on the day, but the foundations were laid.
In that case, a question presents itself: has the team really turned a corner, or is it a happy coincidence that Mekies has enjoyed generally stronger results since taking the top job?
Azerbaijan, while an extreme circuit and something of an outlier, is a more complicated challenge than Monza, which is all about straight-line speed.
McLaren, for example, with what’s been a far more adaptable, usable car this year, will have a lot more room to play in the grey area between setting up for a speedway and setting up for a traditional street track.
Expecting another Verstappen rout would be folly. But if the Dutchman can interrupt McLaren’s weekend, it would be a sign of success.
But Marko appears to be aiming higher than that.
“For Baku, the fast circuits, I’m very optimistic,” he told Autosport, but he notably added: “I am hopeful for Singapore, the only race we didn’t win [with Verstappen so far.
“Normally on slow circuits [we struggle], but I believe now everything is possible in this period.”
Perhaps this is a two-week challenge, then. After going seven races with just one podium finish, if Verstappen can end the Singapore Grand Prix with four podiums on the bounce, maybe we can say Red Bull Racing really is back — and by then Mekies might feel a little more comfortable in the hot seat.