Baku often rewards the brave with skinny wings and big stops, and it usually coaxes a few late-season experiments out of the title contenders. Not this time for McLaren. While three of the frontrunners have sneaked in tweaks for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, the MCL39 arrived exactly as it left Monza.
The FIA’s Friday morning paperwork laid it all out: teams must declare any revised aero parts, and there were only a handful worth circling with a red pen. Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari have each nudged their cars along; McLaren, conspicuously, hasn’t—joining most of the midfield in keeping the powder dry as F1 heads into the final third of the campaign and the current era winds down.
Red Bull’s detail work is on the rear corners, with a re-profiled rear inboard wing assembly designed to punch up local aero load while keeping the flow tidy. It’s classic Red Bull: marginal gains in the bits you don’t notice until you look at the lap time delta on the straight-to-brake sequence into Turn 1.
Mercedes has gone the other end of the car, trimming the chord on a front wing flap. The aim is clear—clean up balance for the long-run, low-drag configuration that Baku demands, and make the front end play nicer with a low-downforce rear wing. On a circuit that’s half drag race, half brick wall, keeping the car settled when you stand on the brakes matters as much as top speed.
Ferrari’s update is strictly venue-specific. The Scuderia has enlarged the front brake duct cooling exits to cope with Baku’s brake-munching nature. The City Circuit’s long flat-out section funnels into a handful of heavy braking zones; if you get greedy on the pedal without enough air moving through the system, the final laps can become an exercise in survival.
And McLaren? Nothing new on the MCL39. That’s not a panic headline—just a sign they’re content with the package they have and the development runway they’ve chosen. With bigger regulation shifts hovering on the horizon for the coming seasons, some teams are picking their battles and budgets. No one at Woking will be losing sleep if their existing low-drag kit is already sweetly balanced for the castle walls and the 2.2-kilometre blast.
They’re not alone. Aston Martin, Alpine, Williams, Sauber and Haas have also resisted the urge to open the parts crates this weekend. In a cost-capped world, you don’t bring new carbon unless you’re sure it buys lap time here and doesn’t compromise the rest of the calendar.
One exception beyond the big three: Racing Bulls. The Faenza squad has given its drivers the option to bolt on updated front brake ducts for Azerbaijan, a circuit-specific tweak intended to sharpen cooling efficiency via refined duct geometry. The same thinking continues at the rear of the car, with revised rear brake ducts to match. It’s a modest but sensible Baku play—protect the brakes, protect the race.
This is the familiar late-season pattern. As the window narrows, big-ticket upgrades give way to event-led fettling: brake ducts for heat, wing tips for drag, tiny surface changes that make the car just a touch easier to drive when it matters. The headline numbers don’t change, but the way the car treats its tyres into lap 40 can.
So the paddock split is clear. Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari have fired small shots in search of clean execution in a low-drag, high-brake weekend. McLaren and much of the midfield have chosen continuity over novelty. If you’re reading between the lines, that’s confidence in baseline set-ups versus a need to squeeze a little more out of the package around 340km/h.
Baku tends to expose the bold and the unprepared equally. The team that finds front-end bite without spiking drag will own the slipstream games down the main straight—and live to brake late into Turn 1. The rest is just paperwork.
