Title fight jolted: Piastri bins it in red‑flag mayhem as Baku qualifying hits record chaos
Baku did what Baku does. In a qualifying session that lurched from one stoppage to the next, Oscar Piastri found the wall in Q3 and, with it, may have handed the momentum of the title race back to the chasing pack.
The McLaren driver – and championship leader by 27 points over teammate Lando Norris – slid straight on at Turn 3 as the final minutes of Q3 began to matter. He missed the apex, went deep, and clouted the barriers hard enough to rip the right‑front from the MCL39. A thump of the steering wheel told you everything about how much that one hurt.
It was Piastri’s first headline mistake since that damp Melbourne off, and he didn’t sugarcoat it on the way back to the pits: he’d simply braked too late. No excuses, just an expensive lapse at exactly the wrong corner on exactly the wrong day.
When the red flag came out for Piastri, it wasn’t just another pause – it was history. Baku’s stop‑start hour ballooned past the hour mark and set a new record for the most red flags in a single qualifying session: six in total. The city’s concrete canyons punished everyone who got greedy or merely unlucky. Alex Albon, Nico Hülkenberg, Franco Colapinto, Ollie Bearman and Charles Leclerc all found the scenery at various points across Q1, Q2 and early Q3, turning the session into a repair‑truck relay.
Before his crash, Piastri sat sixth on the timesheet, and with just over three minutes left, that was always going to be vulnerable once the session restarted. More pressing, though, is the state of that McLaren. If the rebuild requires anything that breaches parc fermé, he’ll be starting from the pit lane on Sunday. Given the narrow margins at the front and the nature of Baku’s race-day roulette, that’s the difference between damage limitation and outright damage to a title lead.
McLaren’s mechanics now have a late-night arithmetic problem: replace what’s necessary to make the grid, but not so much that it triggers a pit‑lane start. The MCL39 has been a faithful ally for Piastri all season; tonight it’ll need some TLC.
Baku’s Turn 3 isn’t the most famous corner here, but it’s a trap – a deceptive braking zone that tightens and punishes the slightest misjudgment. It asked the same unnerving question all afternoon, and plenty of big names got the answer wrong. The cumulative effect was a qualifying rhythm that never existed: tyres cooling, nerves fraying, and lap plans shredded. In that kind of session, even the drivers who usually colour within the lines can end up outside them.
As for the championship picture, there’s no need for doom bells just yet. Piastri has been relentlessly tidy in 2025, and there’s still an entire Grand Prix to run on a circuit that loves a plot twist. But this was a rare unforced error from a driver who’s made very few this year, and it hands opportunity to Norris and whoever else can keep it clean on Sunday.
There’s a title on the line now, and the walls in Baku have a nasty habit of deciding who blinks first. Today, it was Piastri. Tomorrow, he’ll need the kind of response that defines champions.
