Formula 1 has enjoyed its northern spring break, but it’s time to get back down to business with one of the most dependably wacky races on the calendar.
The Azerbaijan Grand Prix has established a niche for itself as home of the street fighters in its short six seasons on the calendar. True, most of those street fights take place between drivers and the wall, but the result is the same: unpredictable results and no shortage of action.
No driver has ever won this race twice. Only one driver has scored more than one pole position. Picking the result is a mug’s game around a track that’s as fast in one half as it is narrow in the other.
Watch the Formula 1 Azerbaijan Grand Prix 2023 live and ad-break free during racing on Kayo Sports this Sunday, 30 April, at 9:00pm AEST. New to Kayo? Start your free trial now >
Not enough spice for you? This weekend the sport is trialling a new format to add more jeopardy into proceedings. Whatever the outcome, it’ll be a fascinating weekend.
WILL THE FORMAT GENERATE BETTER RACING?
The biggest story leading into this weekend’s race is the new format being applied to this first of six sprints for the season.
The headline change is that second practice, previously on Saturday afternoon, has been swapped out for a new qualifying session — the ‘sprint shootout’ to set the grid for the sprint. The sprint race will no longer set the grid for the grand prix, with Friday qualifying setting the Sunday starting order instead.
The tweak is small on paper but will have what the sport hopes will be a significant effect to the quality of racing on Saturday evening by freeing drivers to push harder, safe in the knowledge a mistake or crash won’t affect their grid spot for the grand prix.
Drivers were almost universal in their praise of the change, particularly for the further reduction in practice time and the extra pressure of a second qualifying session, but they were lukewarm on whether the action would be improved.
“I think it’s not like everyone’s going to be taking silly risks for a few points,” Sergio Perez said. “At the end of the day it’s important to be able to bring the car home and have a good Sunday, so I think it’s not going to change that much.”
Several of them also emphasised that while they enjoyed the sprint format as a novelty, they didn’t want to see it become the default F1 weekend.
“I don’t want to have a sprint race every single weekend,” Lando Norris said. “I think it’s still important to have what we’ve had for many years. I think that’s what makes Formula 1 exciting and cool.
“I like just having the Saturday quali and the Sunday race. But I think every now and then having these sprint races is good for the fans good for the people watching.”
But there’s also been another interesting and unexpected piece of feedback from the drivers about the timing of the sprint shootout, set for 12:30pm local time (6:30pm AEST).
“When you wake up and have breakfast and you’re straight into qualifying, you have to really wake up,” Yuki Tsunoda said.
Esteban Ocon though that “some drivers are not going to be awake, are going to make mistakes”.
Fernando Alonso likewise raised the fact that the schedule appeared to eat into his meal time.
“We have breakfast, we go in the car, we tie the belts and we are into Q1,” he said, saying he’d never experienced such a tight turnaround from crumpets to car.
CAN SERGIO PÉREZ STRIKE BACK ON A STREET TRACK?
Much was made of Sergio Pérez’s street-track prowess in Saudi Arabia, where he duly nabbed pole and won the race in what Red Bull Racing described as his most complete performance for the team since joining in 2021 — albeit Max Verstappen was eliminated early from qualifying with a failed drive shaft.
That result drew him to within one point of Verstappen’s title lead and won him some crucial momentum, though he squandered much of it with a scrappy weekend in Australia that saw him crash out of qualifying before setting a time. A gutsy recovery from pit lane to fifth blew out his deficit to 15 points.
It’s of course early days yet, but Pérez would be kidding himself to think that he can afford to let that grow any larger in what was always going to be an uphill battle to dethrone Red Bull Racing’s lead driver.
What better place to strike back that a street circuit, and one on which he’s won before and collected three other podiums.
“I enjoy this place certainly,” he said. “It’s a circuit that really suits my style, and that’s helped me to shine a bit more in this place.”
Though no driver is yet to win twice in Baku given the track’s propensity of wacky results.
“I think what you’ve done in the past doesn’t really matter. Every weekend is a new challenge.
“We come here to Baku and the challenge is even greater with just FP1 and then straight into qualifying.
“Baku is always very easy to make mistakes and finish your weekend, so that will be priority number one, to finish both races, and to build confidence in FP1 will be key.”
It’ll take more than just confidence to beat Verstappen, but a little extra certainly wouldn’t hurt.
WHAT ABOUT McLAREN’S UPGRADES?
When McLaren rolled out in pre-season testing and the first race of the year looking badly undercooked, the team asked us to suspend judgment until the Azerbaijan Grand Prix and its first major upgrade package.
This set of updates stems back to decision made late last year in what was then the early stages of development for 2023. The team realised that it had taken a wrong development turn and needed to start afresh, but that blew out the car’s completion time by a couple of months — to this weekend in fact.
The car Oscar Piastri and teammate Norris will field this weekend is therefore the car McLaren wanted to start the season with. It’s the team’s true MCL60, if you like.
“I think the point of it being what we wanted to start the season with is still very true,” Piastri said. “I think obviously there are going to be other teams that have upgrades as well — we’re not going to be the only ones on the grid, I’m sure there’ll be plenty of other teams that go quicker as well.
“It’s not going to be a magic bullet that gets us to the top of the grid; it should be a moderate step in performance.”
The floor isn’t just the key performance part of the modern F1 car, it’s also the only place that’s seen any meaningful rule tweaks compared to last year — tweaks that caught McLaren off-guard and led the team to this revision.
But Piastri cautioned not to expect too much. While the team was adamant the new floor would help the drivers find time around the long Baku track, it wasn’t designed to change the fundamental characteristics of the car.
“It’s more about raising the [performance] limit,” he said. “Ultimately it should just bring more performance. We’re not expecting it to massively chance the balance of the car.
“I don’t think it should impact the behaviour of the car too much hopefully, it just makes us quicker. That’s the plan.”
The target is for the new McLaren to be a more upgradeable baseline car bundled with a modest performance gain. If this weekend’s updates work, we won’t really see progress for several rounds yet.
CAN FERRARI BOOST MORALE?
There are so many circuits that carry with them bad 2022 memories for Ferrari, but Baku must be near the top of the list.
Both championships were rapidly slipping away. Charles Leclerc’s engine had failed in Spain, then both he and teammate Carlos Sainz were duded by poor strategy in Monaco. Suddenly Azerbaijan had the vibe of a season on the line.
Leclerc took pole, but the race unravelled rapidly. Sainz exited after eight laps with hydraulics problems, and Leclerc was out 13 laps later with a blown power unit.
The team arrives in 2023 in even worse shape than that. The power unit is still unreliable and the car is less competitive, with the title already effectively free from its grasp.
But making things markedly worse is that the team’s back of house isn’t in order. Laurent Mekies is leaving for AlphaTauri at the end of the year — though Ferrari said the Red Bull-backed team’s announcement was premature given Mekies is under a long-term contract — and now there are rumours in the Italian media Leclerc is at the end of his tether.
The whisper is that the Monegasque has been engaged in talks with Mercedes for a drive. Ferrari is rebuilding, but the exodus of talent is seeing it slip only backwards, and Leclerc’s patience has run out — or so say the rumours.
“No, not yet. Not for the moment,” Leclerc said responding to the rumours. “For now I am fully focused on the project I am today, which is Ferrari. As I said, I fully trust and I‘m confident for the future, then we’ll see.
“I‘m fully committed to Ferrari, and I love Ferrari. It’s always been a dream for me to be in this team, and my main priority is to win the world championship with the team. So no, it’s not something in my mind.”
Leclerc is under contract until the end of next year. Mercedes is expected to retain an unchanged line-up for at least another season. If there’s any truth to the rumours — and Leclerc has clearly denied that there is — it’s a long-term strategy at best.
But whatever the case, it’s been a rough weekend for Ferrari and it’s barely started. The long-suffering Italian team could use a morale-boosting result to steady the ship this weekend.
CAN ALONSO KEEP THE STREAK ALIVE?
Fernando Alonso has been careful to moderate expectations of Aston Martin round by round as the pleasant surprise of the team’s surging form has sunk in. He’s been right to, with the car brand new and needing to be tested across a broad spectrum of circuits.
The three tracks to date and three consecutive third-place finishes have given a strong enough indication that the car belongs at the front, but in Azerbaijan it will face a stern test of its biggest weakness: straight-line speed.
Relative to Red Bull Racing the AMR23 has generated all its performance through the corners but shipped time down the straight, where its draggy high-downforce aero has left its motor breathless by the time the driver hits the brakes.
While there’s plenty of twisty stuff in Baku, this is definitely a low-downforce circuit thanks to that very long blast down the front straight that sees cars tip over 340 kilometre per hour into the first braking zone.
You could therefore think of this weekend as the final frontier of Aston Martin’s baseline performance.
“Here we have our low-downforce wing at the back of the car trying to chase a bit more top speed, but we don’t know if that’s enough or not to keep with the top teams,” Alonso said. “I think it’s going to be an interesting part of the season now.
“We’re in a position that maybe we didn’t expect. We don’t know if we’re fit enough to keep going in this position. We have a very fast car, but we need to be a very top team also in every area, and one of those will be the development rate.
“We are aware that if we’re sixth or seventh one of the weekends, we have to take it, and this is maybe more out natural position, but we will not give up our hope of trying to keep challenging Red Bull especially and trying to win a race on day.”
And as for that rumour about Taylor Swift, Alonso wouldn’t be drawn.
“Nothing to say,” he said. “I don’t comment!”
HOW CAN I WATCH IT?
The Azerbaijan Grand Prix is live and ad-break free during racing on Kayo Sports and Fox Sports.
Practice is tonight at 9:30pm (AEST) followed by qualifying at 11pm.
The first-ever sprint shootout starts at 6:30pm on Saturday followed by the sprint race at 11:30pm.
The Azerbaijan Grand Prix starts at 9pm on Sunday.