Baku hasn’t always rewarded bold choices, but Max Verstappen made a very unfashionable one look inevitable. From pole in a city that feeds on chaos, he started on the hard tyre, controlled the tempo for 51 laps, and won the Azerbaijan Grand Prix by a cool 14.609s from George Russell.
The call to go hard from the front was Verstappen’s — and he knew exactly what he was signing up for. Most of the top runners preferred the medium to get off the line cleanly and keep a Safety Car window handy. Verstappen did the opposite: he bet on stretching the first stint until the race came to him.
It came early. Off the launch, he held track position, eased into a rhythm, and began to edge away. When the time finally came, he swapped onto mediums from the lead and rejoined still comfortably in front, converting a high-wire strategy into a routine win. That’s two on the bounce for the reigning four-time World Champion, and you can feel the momentum twitching in his direction again.
“Max had a very clear idea of how this race was going to unfold,” said Red Bull team boss Laurent Mekies afterwards, crediting his driver for pushing the hard-tyre start. The thinking was simple enough: in Baku, cheap pit stops lurk behind every Safety Car. Ride out the first stint, avoid being undercut by fortune, and only stop when you control the terms. Risky? Sure. If an early Safety Car turns up while you’re stuck on hards, you look like a hostage to events. But this time the race stayed clean for long enough, and Verstappen disappeared up the road.
The backdrop made the decision even braver. Saturday’s qualifying was pure Baku bingo — six red flags, a new F1 record, and a grid assembled in fits and starts. Verstappen emerged from that mess with pole and a plan that ran against the grain.
He admitted it wasn’t exactly conventional. Starting on the hardest compound from P1 is the sort of thing strategists doodle in notebooks and then cross out. His worry wasn’t pace; it was the small stuff that can wreck a race before it even begins: a sluggish launch, or a Safety Car at the wrong time. “Once we got 20 laps in, I felt a lot better about it,” he said, calling the choice “the right one” in the end.
The result didn’t need dressing up. It was Verstappen at his stripped-back best — no fireworks, no elbows, just clean air and a clock that always read his way. And it came with a familiar message to the rest: give him a car he trusts and a strategy he believes in, and he’ll make a tense race look almost procedural.
If it felt oddly reminiscent of Monza a few weeks back, there’s a reason. That afternoon Red Bull flirted with staying long, only to be forced in by tyre life and left exposed to a Safety Car that never quite arrived. Lesson learned. In Baku they moved first, on their terms.
George Russell chased hard for Mercedes and banked second, but never truly had Verstappen within reach once the stint offset played out. The gap told the story. The rest of the field spent the afternoon watching a race Verstappen had largely neutralised by Lap 1.
Zoom out, and the stakes are clear with seven rounds to go. According to the championship standings, Verstappen has pared Oscar Piastri’s lead down to 69 points. It’s still a big number, but the direction of travel matters just as much at this stage of the year. If Verstappen keeps stacking wins like this, the conversation shifts from “mathematically possible” to “realistic headache” for McLaren’s young title leader.
And there’s the other piece that lingers: confidence. This was a driver and team in lockstep — on strategy, on tyre life, on pace. The hard tyre from pole was unusual; the execution was not. In Baku, Verstappen took the most conservative tyre, made it the most aggressive move, and turned a street race built for ambushes into a textbook lights-to-flag.
Back-to-back wins. A closing gap. A champion suddenly within shouting distance of a fifth straight crown. The maths still favours Piastri. The mood does not.
