Antonelli's championship advantage shrunk in Baku
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Speaking after the race, Kimi Antonelli described his Baku weekend as the worst by far of his 2026 Formula 1 season after finishing fifth, scoring 10 points and leaving Azerbaijan 66 points ahead of George Russell.
There was some awkwardness in the championship leader’s admission given the standout season he has been enjoying, and it probably said more about his year than a comfortable win might have.
Russell took pole by eight tenths of a second, a margin he called the biggest of his career, led from start to finish and collected 25 points after a flawless race in which he resisted huge late pressure from Max Verstappen. It was the kind of weekend that ought to unsettle a team-mate fighting him for the title.
But Antonelli leaves Azerbaijan looking even more like a world champion in waiting, not despite the messy weekend shaped by an unforced error, but because of his mishaps and the way that he navigated them.
Baku has always been a circuit that rewards the sort of clean, confident weekend that Russell commanded, and has always punished anyone who lacks or loses the complete self-assurance needed between the uncompromising walls of the street circuit.
Antonelli admitted he lacked confidence around Baku
Mercedes
Antonelli crashed out of qualifying in in Q1, while his team-mate was building up to a pole that left the rest of the field staring, and even the British driver himself surprised.
Antonelli would start the race from 16th.
Mistakes around Baku cost more than time, because the walls leave no room to regroup, and Antonelli’s own assessment, as he made clear afterwards, was that the crash had cost him his confidence as well as his grid slot.
What he did next is where his weekend gets more interesting.
From 16th, at a circuit that manufactures safety cars and restarts, the temptation is to gamble: dive up the inside, chase the places now, trust the chaos to bail you out.
Aware of his own limitations, Antonelli didn’t try to force the issue.
By lap five he had gained a single place. By lap 10 he was only 14th. When Alex Albon put his Williams into the barriers on lap 31, Antonelli was eighth and around 35 seconds behind Russell.
That deficit looked like a lost weekend, and in the sense of winning the race, it really was.
Then Baku did what Baku usually does. The full safety car bunched the field and the restart, essentially at the start-finish line, turned Turn 1 into a wreck.
Antonelli made slow progress at the start of the race
Grand Prix Photo
Franco Colapinto locked up and hit his Alpine team-mate Pierre Gasly, who was pushed into Lando Norris. All three were out, Gasly and Norris an innocent party.
Two laps later, Oscar Piastri, running third and heading for his first podium since Miami, locked up and was forced to bail out into a run-off area, dropping out of the points.
Antonelli was not among the cars in the barriers, but the restart didn’t leave him unscathed either. By his own account, he was carrying big floor damage from that point on.
That is the part of the drive that deserves the most credit.
Driving to a plan is easy when the car is fast. Doing it with a damaged floor, no real pace and a head not yet cleared of a qualifying crash is what separates a championship leader from a quick driver on a good day.
Afterwards, he was frank about all of it: “Yeah, I think it’s one of those days where you have to be happy with P5. Obviously, it was the worst weekend by far of the season. I was just, you know, I felt always a step behind, and especially with the mistake, in fact, in qualifying, the confidence level was not high.
The Italian goes into Sepang with a 66-point lead
Grand Prix Photo
“And in today’s race, I just tried to… today was about damage limitation, especially because I didn’t have a strong pace, and also after the safety car restart, I was carrying a big damage, a big floor damage. So, it was not easy out there, but just did my best.”
Antonelli didn’t dress fifth up as a triumph given where he was coming from, nor treat it as a disaster. Damage limitation, is exactly what it was, and Antonelli said he was happy with it.
Fifth is not a result Antonelli would have celebrated on Friday. Accepting it on Saturday, when so many around him were throwing their races away, is a form of maturity that a 66-point lead is built on.
The numbers back the self-assessment.
Russell took 25 points and Antonelli 10, so the lead shrank by 15, from 81 to 66. That is a real dent, but the result was also further confirmation that Russell is the only driver in a somewhat realistic position to challenge for the title.
Norris, the on-form man in the past few races, made mistakes in the race and scored nothing after being taken out at Turn 1, while Lewis Hamilton, sixth after Antonelli passed him for fifth, took two points fewer.
Baku opened a triple-header, with the Bahrain Grand Prix at Sepang and Singapore to follow, and it was an opportunity for his rivals to make inroads before the title maths becomes even harder.
In that sense, Russell made a real dent, but the Briton is yet to take a new power unit that will translate into a back-of-the-grid start.
George Russell had it his way for most of the 2026 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, thanks to an underwhelming McLaren and rare error from Kimi Antonelli. But then came the late safety car
Everyone else who might have exploited Antonelli’s bad Saturday found their own way to waste Sunday.
Perhaps the most revealing thing he said was the least flattering: “I think, you know, it’s this weekend, it taught me a lot. And I think, you know, in many occasions this weekend, I don’t know, I just probably also with the mindset was not in the best place. So, yeah, I’ll just make sure that next weekend we get back at the right level.”
Championship leaders rarely volunteer that their head was not in the right place.
A driver who was truly rattled would more likely blame the car, the tyres or the restart.
Antonelli, who is worth remembering every weekend only just turned 20, blamed his own mindset, a diagnosis that is uncomfortable to make but a habit of drivers who intend to stay on top.
Champions are not defined by weekends where everything works, but by how they deal with the bad ones and what they make of them in difficult circumstances.
Baku was the second kind, and while his fifth place is nothing compared to winning from the back at Monza, Antonelli never dropped below the standard that decides titles.
His championship lead may have shrunk a little, but even in his worst weekend, he showed the composure and maturity of a driver who understands that titles are decided as much by days like this as by the days at Monza.
