The race where Sebastian Vettel proved anything can happen in F1

The 2026 Azerbaijan Grand Prix is almost upon us, for it will be run this coming Saturday, September 26, a day earlier than initially scheduled, because Azerbaijan Remembrance Day is observed annually on September 27 so that Azerbaijanis may mourn those who died during the second Nagorno-Karabakh War of 2020. As you read these words the Formula 1 drivers and teams are therefore assembling in Baku, which is why my mind has turned to the corresponding race five years ago: the 2021 Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

The Baku City Circuit is made up of two long straights, two short straights, and 20 mostly tight corners, its 3.730 miles (6.003km) delineated by SAFER and Tecpro barriers, Armco, concrete blocks, catch fencing, and medieval stone walls; and when, on the afternoon of Thursday, June 3, 2021, I walked its layout with my old friend, the experienced, intelligent, and capable F1 engineer Tom McCullough, for we were both then senior men at Aston Martin, we concluded that a podium finish for one of our drivers three days later was about as likely as Lord Lucan riding into the paddock on Shergar.

But the story really begins with the car that we thought we were getting, for the team had been called Racing Point in 2019 and 2020 and it had enjoyed a giant-killing 2020, finishing fourth in the F1 constructors’ world championship that year behind only Mercedes, Red Bull, and McLaren, F1 titans all. Moreover, Sergio Pérez had won for Racing Point the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix thanks to a drive of impressive resilience and remarkable composure, recovering from a lap-one collision with Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari to transform what had initially looked like a catastrophe into the greatest performance of his F1 career. The Racing Point RP20 had acquired the nickname ‘pink Merc’, a mischievous reference to the lurid livery dictated by its title sponsor BWT and the generous extent to which its technical design and spec had benefited from Mercedes know-how and componentry, but, whatever anyone thought of its parentage, one inescapable fact remained: it was a very good car.

So when the team was renamed Aston Martin for 2021, many of us expected the good times to continue to roll, albeit not in pink but in British Racing Green. After all, we were still working in the same factory; many of the same excellent people were still designing and building our cars; Mercedes knowhow and technical underpinnings remained part of the equation; our budgets had increased thanks to the patronage of the team’s majority shareholder Lawrence Stroll; and we had signed Sebastian Vettel, a four-time F1 world champion.

But the trouble was that the Mercedes aerodynamic design philosophy that had influenced the creation of the Aston Martin AMR21 was not as effective as Merc’s aero approach had been the year before. As a result the 2021 Mercedes W12 was still a fast car in Lewis Hamilton’s hands, because Hamilton was at his shatteringly brilliant best in 2021, but it was no match for the Mercedes winning machines to which the F1 paddock had over the past few years become accustomed.

Our first five 2021 grands prix therefore delivered us a decidedly sobering experience. Vettel finished P15, P15, P13, P13, and P5, that fifth place at Monaco providing a badly needed injection of morale, and in the same races Stroll finished P10, P8, P14, P11, and P8. They were not disastrous results, and we arrived in Azerbaijan lying a respectable fifth in the F1 constructors’ world championship standings; but there is a difference between confidence and delusion, F1 teaches you to recognise that distinction very quickly, and we therefore had little evidence to suggest that we could look forward to anything better than a decent haul of points on the streets of Baku.

Qualifying hardly encouraged optimism, for just four minutes into Q1 Lance crashed at Turn 15. The car was damaged, his qualifying session was over, and, because he had failed to set a lap time, it was at first not certain that he would be permitted to start the race. Seb qualified 11th. So there we were: one car halfway down the grid and the other, temporarily, not on it at all. I am glad to say that after a confab the stewards decided to allow Lance to start, but, even so, the team dinner in our paddock catering area on Saturday evening was a muted affair.

Sunday dawned bright, sunny, and warm; the race began on time; at the start Vettel got away well; and soon he had moved up from 11th to ninth; but more significant was our decision to keep him out on track while others made tyre stops. One by one the cars ahead of him began to peel into the pitlane until, for four glorious laps, an Aston Martin was leading the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. We knew it was an artificial situation, of course, that Seb’s track position was out of sync, and that the drivers who had already tyre-stopped would be ahead of him once again after he eventually also tyre-stopped. But, even so, the staff of midfield F1 teams tend to be disproportionately grateful for small mercies, and in that context there are some forms of unreality that are simply too enjoyable to correct, and watching our car circulating at the head of the field was one of them. Indeed, I remember photographing the timing screens showing the shorthand moniker VET at the very top.

When Seb finally tyre-stopped, he found himself in seventh place, having made excellent use of a clear track to overcut Yuki Tsunoda (AlphaTauri) and benefiting also from Carlos Sainz having shunted his Ferrari. Suddenly Vettel’s race was beginning to look rather more interesting. We had not conjured the impossible, no, but we had made the first phase of a race strategy work. In F1, particularly when you are not accustomed to seeing your cars at the sharp end of a race, those two things can feel remarkably similar.

Then, on lap 30, just as we were beginning to feel guardedly happy about our prospects, Stroll’s Aston Martin suffered a tyre failure at Turn 20 and was pitched violently into the barrier. It was an ugly accident, the sort that stops dead every conversation in an F1 garage. Whatever you may have been discussing a second earlier – tyres, lap times, fuel levels, whatever – immediately becomes irrelevant. You watch one of your drivers slam into a wall at high speed, then you wait in silence for a radio call from him that tells you that he is OK. The call came, thank god, and Lance climbed from his wrecked car shaken, stirred, but unhurt. The safety car was deployed, the marshals began clearing the debris, and the race took another turn.

Vettel had benefited from Fernando Alonso (Alpine) making a tyre stop ahead of him so, when he passed Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari at the post-safety car restart then soon after also overtook Pierre Gasly’s AlphaTauri, he found himself in fourth place. At that point we began to dream of a podium finish, as all F1 team members who are not used to podiums always do when one of their drivers moves up to P4. To be clear, I had been at McLaren when Lewis Hamilton had won the 2008 F1 drivers’ world championship, and I had remained at McLaren while he, Heikki Kovalainen, and Jenson Button had been routinely winning grands prix for us every year until 2012. At McLaren success was normal, but at Aston Martin it felt foreign. Seb’s sudden elevation to P4 was therefore not merely exciting; no, it was intoxicating.

Then on lap 45 Max Verstappen, who had been cruising to an effortless victory, suffered a left-rear tyre failure at Turn 20 – just as Lance had 16 laps previously – pitching his Red Bull into the barrier. Thank goodness Max, like Lance, was able to climb out uninjured, but the F1 drivers’ world championship leader was out of the race and the safety car was deployed again. Seb was now third. Then, four laps later, the race was red-flagged.

Now the emotional temperature inside the Aston Martin garage became genuinely febrile, for there is a particular kind of tension that descends on a bunch of racing men and women when an F1 grand prix is paused so close to its scheduled cessation. You cannot celebrate because it is not yet over. You cannot relax because there is still pressing work to do – especially for the engineers and mechanics. The rest of us stare at the timing screens, then at the car, then at the driver, then at the timing screens again, because you have to look at something. In my case I scribbled a few words in my notebook. When you make eye contact with your colleagues, you do not speak. Instead you shrug meaningfully. You know what the other is thinking, because he or she is thinking exactly the same thoughts as you are, if your jumble of emotions can constitute something as orderly as can accurately be described by the word ‘thoughts’.

After a delay of 34 minutes the race resumed via a standing start that would commence lap 50. The scheduled lap count was 51. Two laps remained therefore. We had gone from contemplating a points finish to dreaming of something much more exhilarating: a sniff of victory. As the cars stormed off towards Turn 1, Hamilton got slightly the better launch, and he duly shaped to pass Pérez. Then, as he positioned his Mercedes for the Turn 1 braking zone, he inadvertently selected an incorrect brake mode, as a result of which his Merc did not slow as he had expected it to, and it hurtled straight on down the escape road. Suddenly Vettel was second, just a few metres behind Pérez.

There are moments in racing when the fan in all of us surfaces, however many years we may have been working in our wonderfully capricious sport. Now was one of those moments. I began to bellow, “Come on Seb! Come on mate! Come on!” F1 garages are noisy places, so I could not hear what my colleagues were saying – or shouting – but I could see that we were all yelling similar invocations. I continued to holler throughout lap 50 and for at least half of lap 51, until I finally and reluctantly had to accept that Pérez had everything under control, and my voice began to disappear. Sergio duly held onto his lead, although Seb chased him all the way to the flag. The gap between them at the end was 1.385sec: so near and yet so far.

Even so, no-one in the Aston Martin garage felt disappointed. We had started with Seb a mediocre 11th on the grid; we had endured Lance’s accident; we had watched the race turn itself inside out; and we had seen one of our cars lead an F1 grand prix, then run fourth, then third, and finally second. It was Aston Martin’s first F1 podium in its modern era.

We all ran down the pitlane to cheer Seb on the podium. After that I remember taking him to the TV pen for his post-race interviews, which afforded me the particularly agreeable experience of once again inhaling the distinctive aroma of an F1 driver whose fireproof overalls had just been drenched in champagne (actually Ferrari Trento in 2021). Seb was all smiles, as were we all. He had driven brilliantly, our engineers had executed our planned strategy faultlessly, our mechanics had not put a foot or a hand wrong all afternoon, and a welcome dollop of serendipity had done the rest.