Baku bites: Albon clips Turn 1, triggers red flag and exits Q1
Alex Albon’s qualifying ended almost as soon as it began in Baku, the Williams driver brushing the Turn 1 wall six minutes into Q1 and parking a wounded car at pit exit to bring out the red flags.
Rolling into his first proper push lap, Albon turned in a fraction too early and tagged the inside barrier with the front-left. The impact snapped the suspension, sent the wheel askew and left him no option but to pull up and climb out. “F**k, I’m out. Sorry,” came the immediate radio, a blunt assessment and an instant reality check for a Williams outfit that had walked into qualifying with reason to be optimistic.
That optimism was grounded in pace: Albon was seventh in final practice, only seven-tenths off FP3 benchmark Lando Norris. Around Baku’s stop-start sweeps and 90-degree corners, that kind of gap keeps you in the conversation for Q3. Instead, it’s an early bath—harsh even by street-circuit standards.
The incident halted the session and forced the field to reset, an irritation for those still trying to build rhythm and get tyre temps in the window. For Albon, it was terminal. The front-left took the brunt, but with any contact like that there’s a list of checks that follows—upright, steering rack, floor, even the gearbox mountings if the car’s snapped over a kerb on the way out. The Williams crew will earn their dinner tonight, and they’ll need to do it inside parc fermé boundaries.
It’s a gut punch because Baku is a track where Albon tends to knit together brave braking and tidy rotation, and Williams’ straight-line efficiency usually gives them a fighting chance on Sunday. The plan now pivots: grid position sacrificed, race day becomes about survival, opportunism and safety cars. This circuit has a habit of serving those up.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the raw speed was there in practice. The FW47 looked compliant over the bumps and confident under braking—exactly what you want when the walls are closer than your engineer’s laptop. But Baku is merciless with the margins. Miss by a couple of centimeters at Turn 1 and you don’t just lose a lap, you lose your afternoon.
Williams has built much of its 2025 campaign around tidier Saturdays and sharper execution. Today was neither, but it’s also the kind of moment that shouldn’t define a weekend. Street tracks are streaky; one well-timed safety car and a clean run can turn a write-off into points. They’ll need a bit of that Sunday chaos to make this one sting less.
