Azerbaijan Grand Prix Debrief
- therookiereporters
- Sep 26
- 2 min read
As Harry Benjamin said, we should “expect the unexpected” for Baku, but boy, were we in for a chaotic weekend.
The bricks were laid in qualifying when six red flags made the session last longer than the entire Italian Grand Prix. The Championship Leader crashed and would start ninth on the grid after a rare mistake from the Aussie, who hasn’t put a foot wrong so far. With our four-time World Champion on pole and Carlos Sainz starting on the front row in his Williams, we were set for an entertaining Grand Prix.
Max Verstappen had a great start and retained the lead for the entire race to take victory with about 15-seconds ahead of second. Meanwhile, Oscar Piastri and Fernando Alonso were investigated for jump starts. Piastri didn’t receive a time penalty due to his crashing at turn 5/6 after locking up. However, Alonso would serve a 5-second time penalty. Due to Oscar’s crash, we had a Safety Car, and on the restart, Norris was caught out by Leclerc, and Tsunoda slipped past the Mercedes of George Russell.
We then saw our first and only yellow flag of the Grand Prix for Franco Colapinto after he and Alexander Albon were battling it out at the back of the pack. The Argentine nudged the Williams driver, resulting in the FIA awarding Albon a 10-second time penalty on lap 20 of 51.
Lando Norris had everything laid out before him to take a chunk out of his teammates' leading margin; however, McLaren’s pit stops have been his hindrance. The Papaya team gave the 25-year-old a slow stop of 4.1 seconds. This meant he lost valuable time and was placed into the heart of a DRS train behind the P3 starter - Liam Lawson.
This sealed the deal for the Grand Prix results and meant that Lando only managed to claw back a couple of points on Oscar. Meanwhile, it was a great result for Red Bull, taking back-to-back wins. Mercedes were certainly content with their silver place by George Russell, who has been under the weather this weekend. Most notably, Williams will be celebrating like they just won the championship with Spaniard Carlos Sainz bringing home valuable points in third, which brings them up to to fifth in the constructors' championship standings.
With the Singapore Grand Prix on the horizon, who knows what it will have in store for us after such an exciting weekend!
Article written by Alice Seager ©️Alice Seager 2025
