It’s unusual that a race should have so much and so little happen all at once.
The Azerbaijan Grand Prix was not an overtaking thriller, and yet it was a race replete with championship implications.
McLaren failed to seal the constructors title in a remarkable episode of falling at the final hurdle.
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Title leader Oscar Piastri appeared to try his best to have his championship lead slashed.
Challenger Lando Norris appeared to try his best to give as many points back to Piastri as he could.
And at the front of the field, Max Verstappen’s domination threatened to up-end everything we thought we knew about the season so far.
“Piastri’s in the wall!” | 01:25
SIMPLE ERROR: PIASTRI AT A LOSS TO EXPLAIN ‘MESSY’ WEEKEND
This is by some margin the messiest weekend of Piastri’s Formula 1 career.
That’s the case pretty much by definition.
Arriving in Azerbaijan, Piastri was on a streak of 44 consecutive finishes, the second longest run in history behind only Lewis Hamilton’s uninterrupted 48 classifications.
He was also on a 42-round scoring run behind Hamilton (48) and Verstappen (43).
Both of these streaks date back to his rookie season. He’s entered only 63 races in total. The majority of his career in Formula 1, in other words, has been dependable, solid and mistake-free.
Until this weekend, it seems.
It wasn’t just one mistake; it was three: crashing in qualifying, jumping the start and smashing on the first lap of the race, leaving him scoreless.
In a championship campaign defined by his rock-solid, steadfast ability to turn up and score, Baku was an aberration — so much so that Piastri himself had no clear explanation for it.
“There’s not been anything that different [about this weekend],” he said, per Racer. “It depends how you want to look at that, but for me, if I felt like I was in a completely different headspace, then it’s easier to blame it on that and also a problem to rectify, but this weekend’s felt like any other weekend.
“Unfortunately there’s been far too many mistakes from start to finish. Every single session has been messy, so just trying to clean that up is the important thing for the future.
“I think it’s rare that I have so many executional errors, so I’m very much focused on putting that behind me.
“I would be much more concerned if these errors were because I was trying to make up time or do things like that. I think they’ve obviously been costly errors but things that can be very, very easily rectified.
“I’m certainly not blaming it on anything else. It was two simple errors on my behalf that caused today.”
It surprised even team boss Andrea Stella, who has long lauded Piastri’s title-winning credentials.
“Some uncharacteristic mistakes for Oscar,” he told Sky Sports. “Hopefully they were all accumulated in this event and now we will be clear for the rest of the season.
“He is probably the most solid, consistent driver so far, so just a one-off event hopefully for him.”
You can contextualise this in one of two ways.
On the one hand, there’s a reason his finishing and scoring streaks were notable: they’re hard to achieve. They’d have to end eventually.
Stella, for one, believes this will be only a blip for the Melburnian.
“I’m sure he will process the situation at the start, he will process the lockup,” he said. “He will get the learning and he will get stronger for the remainder of the season.
“This is one of his stronger characteristics, I would say. I’m sure we will see Oscar jumping back.”
But on the other hand, Piastri’s self-proclaimed messy weekend changes the complexion of the title battle.
The early campaign was defined by Norris’s inconsistency in the face of Piastri proving his title candidacy.
Norris, however, has since ironed out the worst of his mistakes to look more like the predicted match with the Australian.
Did Baku signal the start of a third chapter, a third twist, in the narrative of their championship duel?
Max claims Azerbaijan as Piastri crashes | 02:20
WHY COULDN’T NORRIS CAPITALISE?
There might be more weight behind that contention if Norris was anything other than ordinary this weekend. Gifted two wide-open goals — in qualifying and in the grand prix — the Englishman failed to rise to the occasion, qualifying and finishing seventh.
He took just six points out of Piastri’s lead, shrinking it to 25 points. That’s less than he would have gained for leading a McLaren one-two.
For the second day in a row he was forced to deny that he’d missed an opportunity.
“I did the best I could yesterday and the best I could today,” he told Sky Sports. “The opportunity is there every weekend. Every race I didn’t win was an opportunity missed.
“Of course today I wanted more. Seventh was not a good result, but I couldn’t do anything more today; it was lost yesterday because of going out a bit early, not doing the best lap.
“It was just impossible to overtake.”
It’s worth reflecting that while Piastri made the team’s highest profile mistakes this weekend, Norris and the rest of McLaren contributed to this being Woking’s lowest scoring round since the 2023 Las Vegas Grand Prix.
There was of course Norris’s crash during Friday practice and then his errors in qualifying, but his start was also ordinary, and he badly managed the restart such that he was ninth in the early laps of the race.
Losing a place to Charles Leclerc after the safety car restart defined his race, compromising his pace in the first stint.
But a slow pit stop also contributed. Leclerc had got himself stuck behind Liam Lawson, which meant Norris lost no time to the Ferrari’s new tyres — in fact he had a chance to overcut the Monegasque with his pit stop 18 laps later.
But a 4.1-second service meant he emerged behind Leclerc, who was battling Tsunoda, rather than ahead of both.
A cleaner stop should have seen him at least one place further up the road, and if he’d been ahead of Tsunoda, Lawson would have been an easier target for not having anyone’s DRS to lean on in defence.
Fifth could easily have been on the table. It wouldn’t have been a life-changing result, but in this tight title campaign, those four points could be everything.
Stella, however, argued the slow pit stop made no difference to the outcome, saying the car simply didn’t have the pace to contend for the podium — a remarkable admission after taking home at least one trophy at every round but one before this weekend.
“We didn’t give Lando a fast enough car to make it through the field,” he told Sky Sports.
“The pit stop itself didn’t make any difference because we would’ve ended up pretty much in the area of Leclerc. For me the most important thing to take away is that the car wasn’t fast enough.
“With a fast enough car we would have been able to overtake and then have some free air and in some free air actually use the full potential.
“We could have done better. We should have done better. Lots of learning. We reset and we go again in Singapore.”
HORROR START – Piastri stalls & crashes! | 01:16
IS VERSTAPPEN BACK IN THE CHAMPIONSHIP HUNT?
McLaren’s worst weekend in two years happened to coincide with another dominant victory by Red Bull Racing.
Verstappen was imperious from pole, leading every lap and setting the fastest lap of the race on the way to the chequered flag.
It was his sixth rare career grand chelem — or grand slam — equalling Lewis Hamilton’s tally.
Only the legendary Jim Clark has more, with eight.
After his successful weekend in Azerbaijan, Verstappen now has six poles — more than any other driver — and four wins, which is only one fewer than Norris and three short of Piastri.
He has the second-biggest pole margin of the year and two of the three most dominant victories of the season.
It’s a remarkable set of statistics for a driver who three rounds ago predicted he wouldn’t win another race this season.
It’s an even more remarkable set of statistics for a driver who isn’t in championship contention.
Or is he?
That’s the question left to linger in the paddock as the sport packed down for Singapore in Sunday night.
McLaren boss Stella said on Saturday night that his interpretation of Red Bull Racing’s upgrade in Italy was that it had opened a much wider set-up window for the car that would allow it to run competitively at more circuits.
He said it would make Verstappen a title threat, even though his deficit was a whopping 94 points with eight rounds remaining.
If you’re looking for corroborating information, consider that Yuki Tsunoda turned in the best qualifying and race result of his Red Bull Racing tenure. If Verstappen’s teammate is a canary in the coalmine of the team’s career-killing cars, the Japanese driver’s upturn in form suggests perhaps something really has been fixed.
And now Verstappen has slashed his gap down to 69 points with seven rounds left.
Speaking to Sky Sports, he gave the idea that he might enter the title fight short shrift.
“It’s a lot,” he said. “Basically everything needs to go perfectly from my side, and then a bit of [bad] luck from their side I need as well, so it’s still very tough.”
Notably he didn’t deny that he still had a chance in a subtle change of attitude to the question.
New team principal Laurent Mekies, whose tenure has coincided with this dramatic upturn, also opted against playing down the odds of a late drivers tilt.
“We don’t want to leave any stone unturned when it comes to the 2025 campaign,” he said. “Everybody has been pushing so hard to step by step bring that car back into competitiveness.
“Nobody has ever given up on this season in terms of understanding why we were not reaching the level we wanted.”
But while Mekies praised the progress as genuine, he warned that the next race in Singapore would be a crucial test.
“There is no big item, but there have been a few things that have been unlocked from everyone at the factory, there have been a few things at the track that have been unlocked from the work that Max and Yuki have been doing with their engineers,” he said. “All together it seems to add up, at least on these two tracks [Monza and Baku] with slow-speed corners.
“Here we were back in the game, but Singapore is very, very different in two weeks time.
“Then the rest of the season is back to the medium-speed corners where McLaren had a huge advantage only a couple of races ago.
“We take it race by race.”
Vamos! Sainz ECSTATIC with podium result | 01:03
SAINZ EXECUTES HIS FIRST SMOOTH OPERATION FOR WILLIAMS
You probably would have got good money for betting that Carlos Sainz would get his first podium at Williams before Lewis Hamilton got his maiden at Ferrari.
Though he would refuse to acknowledge it, deep down surely Sainz feels as though it’s a kind of justice for being forced out of his plum Ferrari drive just as he seemed to be reaching his peak.
But the Spaniard’s satisfaction is about much more than schadenfreude.
He’s been blitzed by teammate Alex Albon all season, especially in race conditions. While in qualifying they’ve been closely matched, on Sundays he’d been heavily outscored by the Williams stalwart.
All year he’s insisted that his poor returns weren’t about a lack of pace; rather they were down to poor execution, poor luck and, sometimes, poor driving judgement.
Give him an opportunity to score a big result and he’d get it.
He magnificently passed that test.
“The key was probably just nailing a perfect weekend from practice, quali to race,” he said. “It’s what I’ve been looking for since the beginning of the season — just to nail a perfect weekend.
“The rest of the season has been really up and down with a lot more downs than ups — very unlucky in some cases, job not well done in others by me or by other things that were in our control.
“But I always said to the team from the beginning that whenever a first big opportunity of fighting for a podium comes — as long as we have everything under control and nothing goes wrong and we prove to everyone what we’re doing — and we get that podium, then I’ll be okay, and it’s exactly what ended up happening today.”
Sainz’s drive had all the hallmarks of what made him such a force at Ferrari. Ahead of faster cars that had been tipped to pass him easily, his lap times were metronomically consistent to ensure he built a small but crucial buffer to the pack in the first stint.
He was powerless to hold off George Russell for second, but he just kept Andrea Kimi Antonelli at bay in the final stint to score his first podium for the team.
“Just an exceptional drive,” team boss James Vowles told Sky Sports. “Lap after lap he just built the pace. We knew merc was quick, but well done to him. He didn’t put a foot wrong all weekend.
“This is a rest point where we start and move forward with our season. He needs this, and you’ll see now the positive momentum it generates.”
Sainz’s score tips Williams over 100 points for the first time since 2016. It’s firmed its hold on fifth in the championship.
But the boost it gives Sainz might yet be more valuable as he builds into his role at the aspiring grandee.