The Baku mini-Prix: behind the two dramatic laps in Azerbaijan — MPH

In championship terms, the last five laps ensured the two contenders were neutralised. Max Verstappen, on his way to an apparently comfortable Baku victory, suffered a sudden deflation of his left rear, pitching him hard into the wall at over 200mph. Sixteen laps earlier Lance Stroll had suffered an apparently identical failure. An initial safety car for the Verstappen accident gave way to a red flag as the debris was cleared up. Which left two more racing laps. From a standing start. A sort of mini-Prix, with Verstappen’s Red Bull team-mate Sergio Perez on pole alongside Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes. But Hamilton lasted only a few seconds into the mini-Prix before locking up his front wheels and running up the escape road, rejoining last. The top of the Drivers’ Championship remained exactly as it was coming into the weekend, with Verstappen four points in front of Hamilton, six rounds down.

Like that, Perez won a grand prix for Red Bull. The RB16B was always the form car around here despite not having secured pole, or even the front row – and Perez made a breakthrough in his personal performance since joining the team.

The cars

Red Bull with its decent power, slightly better deployment than Mercedes, great low-speed performance and excellent tyre usage was the perfect package for Baku as it turned out. The team arrived with a choice of two new spoon-profiled wings and chose the higher-downforce version to better look after the tyres.

Mercedes, with its tendency to struggle for tyre temperatures on low-energy circuits like this (both from the low grip of a street track surface and its low-energy, slow, short corners) was a difficult beast. Mercedes began the weekend with quite a high downforce wing by Baku standards, trying to switch on the tyres. But even that wasn’t doing it. They back-to-backed this wing with a lower-downforce one in FP3 and Hamilton decided he’d go with the skinnier one. That and lots of other changes finally brought the car into contention – over two laps, at least (it needed two laps to bring the tyres in). Hamilton put it on the front row, with some tow assistance from his team-mate. Valtteri Bottas stayed with the bigger wing and at no point in the weekend was he anywhere close to the pace, qualifying 10th and finishing out of the points.

Ferrari with its power deficit of around 25bhp and slightly draggier shape knew it was going to be compromised by that 1.4-mile final flat-out stretch parallel to the Caspian. But that its superb agility and easy rotation would be a great asset through the tight old town section. So it would rely on that to keep it in shape there and go with a super-skinny wing to give it competitive speed on the straight. It not only saw them competitive around a track of which they had low expectations but Charles Leclerc, aided by a tow from Hamilton, stuck it on pole for a second consecutive race – Ferrari now has twice as many poles this year as Red Bull!

The positions were perhaps a little mixed up by the Yuki Tsunoda-induced Q3 red flag which denied everyone second runs, the tow-free Verstappen in particular, the scrappy-lap Perez also. Hence they would be starting only third and sixth respectively in what were, in reality, the fastest cars.

Wings & Tyres

A skinny wing around this highly unusual track layout can get you a good qualifying time, probably a better time than a more race-suitable wing which looks after the tyres. Ferrari and Hamilton were flattered in qualifying by their wing choices, and the respective quality of Leclerc’s and Hamilton’s laps. But they were sure to eat their rear tyres faster than the Red Bulls and so it proved.

Hamilton was past initial leader Leclerc at the end of the opening lap, Verstappen and Perez following through not long after. They left the Ferrari behind to fend off the hustling Pierre Gasly’s AlphaTauri.

Hamilton’s straightline advantage was enough to thwart Verstappen’s DRS-aided attacks. But after just nine laps Hamilton’s tyres were fading, luckily for him just as a pitstop’s-worth of gap had opened up behind. He was brought in on lap 11 for a set of hard tyres on which to get to the end.

Pitstops

Red Bull responded with Verstappen on the following lap. His in-lap was 0.8sec faster than Hamilton’s but crucially his pit stop was over 2sec faster. This was because Mercedes had been obliged to hold Hamilton for a couple of seconds to allow Gasly to pit. It was enough to comfortably clear Verstappen past Hamilton.