Formula 1

Winners and losers from F1's 2024 Azerbaijan Grand Prix

by Josh Suttill, Valentin Khorounzhiy, Matt Beer
8 min read

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Carlos Sainz and Sergio Perez's penultimate lap shunt aside, the main entertainment in this year's Formula 1 Azerbaijan Grand Prix was great racing rather than the chaos that has dominated many Baku F1 races.

And it was those fights up and down the field that produced a real mix of winners and losers:

WINNER: OSCAR PIASTRI

You could see injustice in the fact that the driver who’s outscored everyone else on the grid over the last seven F1 weekends, and just pulled off a brilliantly well-judged and combative win, is ostensibly McLaren’s number two driver for the rest of the season.

But the standings don’t lie, Oscar Piastri’s still 32 points away from Lando Norris and therefore a massive 91 off Max Verstappen. And for much of the early part of the season, there were still too many weekends where you wondered where Piastri was on a Sunday.

So don’t waste too much energy on the fact that Piastri began this victorious weekend being informed he might have to be McLaren’s support act. That’s just a pragmatic reality - for now. On this form, you can absolutely see the intra-team status being swapped around in 2025. - Matt Beer

LOSER: MAX VERSTAPPEN

Not Verstappen’s first rough weekend of the season. Not his worst result in terms of the gap to the front either (once you discount the late second stop and the race finishing under virtual safety car).

But the optics of Baku were bad on so many levels. Passed on track by a title rival who’d started nine places behind.

Not just beaten by team-mate Sergio Perez, but nowhere near podium contention on a day when Perez was genuinely in the mix for victory. And Verstappen was lucky to keep even fifth place after a post-race investigation for a needless procedural incident under the VSC.

The chance of this just being an anomaly at a track Perez thrives on are high. And there were enough positive signs from Red Bull’s car changes overall across both cars to suggest it might be onto something that can rescue its season.

But that prospective future glimmer doesn’t change the scale or significance of Verstappen’s defeat here. - MB

WINNER: OLLIE BEARMAN

Nico Hulkenberg's race unravelling in somewhat mysterious circumstances put a bit of extra shine on Ollie Bearman's race, but it's a shine his weekend overall deserved.

Haas was right to move him out of Hulkenberg's way in the early stages - though Bearman was understandably incensed at not being told earlier that he was under-utilising his rear tyres - and ultimately the experienced German had a bit more race pace, but that's not a reasonable benchmark to aim for for someone's second-ever grand prix.

Bearman kept it very respectable, stabilised his time losses to Hulkenberg as the race went on (that in-race improvement was a bit like his Saudi Arabian GP performance) and put himself in position to pick up the pieces in the end.

If this was a Kevin Magnussen weekend, you'd feel it was totally run-of-the-mill. For a 19-year-old to replicate that already in his second start shows why Haas and its team boss Ayao Komatsu refused to pay any mind publicly to Bearman's F2 struggles this season. - Valentin Khorounzhiy

LOSER: CHARLES LECLERC

The number of tracks on the calendar where you could talk about a Charles Leclerc ‘jinx’ says a lot about his pole/win imbalance and Ferrari’s execution issues over his years there. Monaco’s crossed off that luckless list, Baku’s still on it.

The galling thing here was this was probably available. Ferrari may yet conclude that the McLaren was just too strong on the hard tyre for Leclerc to do ultimately anything about Piastri’s surge, but immediately post-race Leclerc felt he and Ferrari had let this one slip via both strategy and tyre management shortcomings - and he was probably right.

Not only that, Leclerc made life so much harder for himself (and his Ferrari's rear tyres) by allowing Piastri to lunge past uncontested in the first place. Not a piece of race craft Leclerc will look back on with pride - MB

WINNER: LANDO NORRIS

Norris pointed out he "couldn't have asked for a lot more" from his Sunday in light of how qualifying had gone. "We would've been happy with eighth."

Yet there was a strong undertone of frustration audible in Norris' post-race answers, and understandably so - because his McLaren looked incredibly potent in clean air, quite clearly the quickest car on track once released by Alex Albon's pitstop.

A win was in play here, and Norris - like his McLaren team - remains hugely incensed by the timing of the yellow flag that thwarted him in Q1. On a per-race basis, they need to be taking more points than this out of Verstappen.

But Verstappen's race was rough enough that McLaren and Norris should come away from Baku smelling blood. The Azerbaijan GP could've kneecapped his title charge, yet instead - despite only a small points gain - it's made it feel more real than ever. - VK

LOSER: NICO HULKENBERG 

Hulkenberg was well and truly mugged on the penultimate lap with both Lewis Hamilton and new stand-in team-mate Bearman dumping him out of the points places in the wake of the Sainz/Perez shunt. 

"A few things happened, I don't want to go into detail now, I need to process it and look at the replays with the team" was Hulkenberg's summary after the race.

He was surprised that the double-waved yellow flags for the "warzone" of debris quickly turned green after the incident zone. That caught him off guard with Hamilton and Bearman slipping past him at the Turn 4 left-hander to drop him to 11th. 

It left Hulkenberg empty-handed for what was otherwise a solid drive. His tyres appeared to drop off enough for Franco Colapinto to pick him off, but Hulkenberg still could have walked away with a point or two had the virtual safety car come out quicker or had he reacted better to the sudden green flag. - Josh Suttill

Winner: Fernando Alonso

There's something about Baku and stealth Fernando Alonso masterclasses.

Given Aston's adrift of the top four teams and sometimes challenged and beaten by those behind, a sixth place finish is a big win for Alonso and Aston. In fact it's the team's best finish since Montreal three months ago.

And Alonso drove superbly too, keeping Albon at a distance despite the Williams driver having a significant tyre advantage.

Capturing Adrian Newey is still Aston's biggest news of the week but its most respectable race in quite some time is a nice cherry on top of that cake. - JS

LOSERS: CARLOS SAINZ AND SERGIO PEREZ

Two drivers being overshadowed by their team-mates both needed a big result here, and both needed it bad enough to have it slip away in a mess of carbon fibre and indignation.

It would've been nice for Sainz to pick off Perez and then probably deal with Leclerc, too, on a weekend where his Ferrari team-mate has towered over him. It would've been more than nice for Perez to complete his genuinely superb Baku weekend with a podium, having conclusively outshone Verstappen.

Ultimately, there is no smoking gun steering movement to place the blame decisively on one or the other - Perez's onboard makes things look bad for Sainz, but Sainz's portrays only a gentle attempt to occupy the racing line while still being ahead.

Both, though, will feel the sting of the lost result for days to come, with Sainz only a few races away from trading a podium-capable Ferrari for a Williams and Perez still fighting for his F1 future. - VK

WINNER: GEORGE RUSSELL

Russell spent much of his post-race media commitments venting his annoyances over the peculiarities of F1's Pirelli rubber, but when the weekend is far enough in the rear view window that irritation will probably become secondary to an appreciation for just how strong his weekend was.

Seemingly on the back foot on Friday, not helped also by a precautionary power unit change, he was running circles around team-mate Lewis Hamilton come Saturday, setting up a very one-sided qualifying battle.

Hamilton's race was never going to fully recover from having to start from the pitlane, but Russell - though struggling quite a bit early on - ultimately turned things around to ensure a healthy points haul, and a positive day for a team he looks increasingly ready to lead next year (or already this year). - VK

LOSER: RB 

RB's point-less second half of the season continued with Daniel Ricciardo a distant 13th and Yuki Tsunoda the first retiree of the race as a legacy of a first lap collision with Lance Stroll that gouged a hole in the RB's sidepod.

It's impossible to know if Tsunoda would have challenged for points, he'd have probably been closer than Ricciardo given Tsunoda's a bit of a specialist around Baku.

But on recent evidence, it seems unlikely he would have beaten the Haas or Williams cars.

Haas has cut RB's advantage to five points in the fight for sixth in the constructors', while Williams's big windfall means it's a proper threat to RB for the rest of the year, with the gap between them now 18 points rather than 28. - JS

Winner: Williams

In stark contrast to RB, Williams and both of its drivers had plenty to celebrate in Baku.

Albon talked about the lack of chaotic races in F1 2024 ahead of the weekend, but it was a small slice of chaos in the form of the Perez/Sainz shunt that upgraded Williams's respectable ninth-10th into a transformative seventh-eighth.

It's the team's first on-the-road double points finish since mid-2021 and a sign that Williams might be F1's new midfield leader.

If that's the case it now has two drivers capable of maximising the potential. Franco Colapinto was brought in to score points and that's exactly what he's done - only two races in.

He was close to Albon throughout the weekend and, if he keeps up this kind of form, maybe he'll get the attention of Sauber, the only non-Red Bull team with an open 2025 seat. - JS

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