F1's big Baku qualifying upsets explained

Outside of the dominant polesitter Charles Leclerc, stand-ins Ollie Bearman and Franco Colapinto were the unquestionable stars of qualifying for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, claiming big wins against experienced, highly-regarded Formula 1 team-mates.

Colapinto - Williams’s recent replacement for Logan Sargeant - reached Q3 and beat team-mate Alex Albon to ninth.

Bearman - standing in for the banned Kevin Magnussen at his 2025 team Haas - was on the cusp of Q3 in 11th, three places ahead of team-mate Nico Hulkenberg.

Both Bearman and Colapinto are in their second weekends as F1 race drivers. Both had to dust themselves off and go again after crashes earlier in the weekend. And they were - by the standards of F1 drivers talking about their team-mates - positively lavished with praise by Hulkenberg and Albon respectively.

But only one of Bearman - a Baku 'double' winner in Formula 2 last year - and Colapinto - who has remarkably never been to the track before this weekend - was truly content in the end.

How Colapinto beat Albon

The obvious caveat in this battle was that only one of the two Williams cars - Colapinto's - actually got to do a second push lap in the final qualifying segment.

Albon had narrowly shaded Colapinto on their first runs in Q3, but was then released too early out of his Williams pit box as the team tried to hook him up with a tow.

Instead, an airbox fan was left attached to the car, and Albon couldn't quite remove it quick enough to then also complete his outlap in time before the chequered flag.

So Colapinto had an open goal in front of him in terms of outqualifying Albon - but that specific outcome was anyway less relevant than the self-evident fact he has run neck-and-neck with Albon all weekend.

"He's been very quick. His short runs especially, he's always been keeping me on my toes," Albon acknowledged.

"A lot of commitment in the Castle section, that's for sure. He's definitely been impressive. 

"The odd mistake here and there, either from him or from me - but generally it's always been very close. In terms of tools and driving [style] and everything, actually I would say Franco and I are more aligned [than Albon and previous team-mate Sargeant] - so there is a bit more similarities between the cars."

Albon also said that his own weekend hadn't felt optimal even beyond the Q3 mishap - as he "really struggled to get the tyres to switch on" but also generally found it unintuitive.

"Just this track's really weird. It's so easy to overdrive. So little grip. Sliding all the time. 

"You really have to kind of underdrive the car to go quicker. And that's been a bit of a tricky thing for me this weekend, getting the tyres to work, all this kind of thing. 

"And honestly I think Franco is just struggling less with it, he's just kind of got on with it, whereas for me it's just been a bit more peaky."

Albon commended Colapinto for shrugging off his first-practice crash, while Colapinto credited Williams for the "boost" the crew gave him in forfeiting their lunch breaks to get his car ready for FP2.

He described making Q3 as "a moment every driver dreams of, and I achieved it in my second weekend in F1", and felt all the laps in qualifying had been good - but also admitted he went wrong with a set-up change late on, pointing to his inexperience as a culprit.

"We did a little step on the set-up to see what we can do, if we could gain a little bit more for the last run on the new tyres, but it didn't really work out," Colapinto explained, adding that his rear tyres weren't holding up through the lap as well - which suggests the 'step' in question will have been something like a minor front wing tweak to sacrifice a bit of downforce.

Scott Mitchell-Malm on how Colapinto impressed most

What was so impressive about Colapinto's performance is not an assisted outqualifying of Albon, or even making Q3.

It's the manner of his driving, the speed, the execution when it counted and the mental fortitude to bounce back from that early practice crash.

Such errors can shred a driver's confidence. And any driver will tell you this is a track where confidence is key.

Colapinto was quick to start pushing in practice, having found a good feeling in the car early, but crunching into the wall could have knocked him into a much more conservative state.

He erased any prospect of that almost immediately in FP2. Colaptino was right there on Friday, right there again on Saturday, and through qualifying as well. There were no major missteps and no flashes of promise met by an ultimate failure to string it together.

What does this point to? One-and-a-half weekends of Colapinto-in-F1 data makes it too hard to say. It could be an all-or-nothing approach to maximise this short-term opportunity, but his demeanour and driving seem more refined than that. It could be that he has gelled quickly with this car and track combination, with Baku being unique. Maybe his lack of knowledge means he has no preconceived ideas of where the limit is?

Perhaps all that matters in his second weekend he's pieced practice and qualifying together more convincingly than his predecessor Sargeant managed in a year and a half.

He needs to finish the job on Sunday, but it means something to have even achieved this.

How Bearman beat Hulkenberg

Whereas Albon can at least rightly point to the fan mishap as causing his defeat, Hulkenberg had no such excuse against Bearman - and didn't try to excuse himself anyway.

"Not fantastic obviously, not great," he fronted up after a two-tenths defeat to Bearman in Q2.

"Didn’t find enough progression through the runs. The last one especially, sector two felt a bit of a challenge and just the laptime didn’t come out of it.

"It’s a massive confidence track. Big braking circuit, big confidence track. Both rookies seemed to get on really well. Personally, I have always been under pressure here and it’s always been difficult for me.

"It just doesn’t suit my natural driving style. It doesn’t fit so much with here. Statistically, from all the previous years, it’s just been how it is."

Hulkenberg was full of praise for Bearman, describing his showing as "very, very, very strong" and "very good".

"From the get-go yesterday he was on the pace. He adapted very fast. He’s a fast learner. I think he really likes these street circuits and he really nails it."

And, like Albon, he emphasised how impressed he was with Bearman putting his earlier crash to the side.

"I know how that feels. I’ve done plenty of those mistakes. It feels bad and it’s s**t. But I did plenty of those. But you see he wiped his mouth and got on with it again and picked up things where he left them yesterday. So a very, very good job."

Bearman's searing self-criticism

Except Bearman didn't exactly put that Saturday morning crash out of his mind - it gnawed away at him after qualifying, and he even cited it as the potential explanation for him just missing out on Q3.

"We just lost a lot of mileage," he lamented, insisting out that the mistakes he made in Q2 - going deep into Turn 11 and having a snap into Turn 12, which together "cost me enough time to stop me going through"  - would've been avoided with more preparation.

Asked what he would've done differently, he said: "Not crash! Not do my first push in FP3 like a quali lap, like an idiot.

"I didn’t account for the track differences. I basically started from where I left off in FP2. But there are no cars running before us on a track like this, so the track basically took a step backwards. It was really slippery."

Bearman acknowledged he's got "great confidence in the car this weekend", but said: "Maybe too much judging by FP3! 

"I’m tough on myself because I know the car could have done more. If I felt like the car was only fast enough for P11 I would be really happy right now. But the car was definitely quick enough to be in Q3. That’s why I’m disappointed."

Asked whether defeating Hulkenberg still made it a good qualifying, he insisted: "No, because I should have been in Q3."