Barriers and catch fencing turn Baku's streets into a race track, photographed ahead of F1's first visit in 2016. Photo: Interfase, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Fourteen races into the 2026 season, the quickest car at the Baku City Circuit is the one nobody laid a finger on.
George Russell closed out Thursday with both practice sessions on his ledger and a 1m 43.347s on the board, 0.552s clear of team mate Kimi Antonelli and 0.827s up on Max Verstappen. The detail that matters more than the gap: Mercedes submitted no upgrades whatsoever for round 15. Not a floor edge, not a cooling louvre, not a mirror stalk. Ferrari did the same. Almost everyone behind them turned up with parts.
The upgrade sheet reads like the championship table upside down
McLaren brought the widest package of any front-runner: a revised sidepod inlet, engine cover and coke line, an alternative sidepod, reworked rear suspension fairings, a new floor edge and diffuser layout, a rear wing that drops its flap to a different Straight Mode position for a bigger drag reduction, and a cooling louvre arrangement built specifically for Baku. Red Bull reshaped floor geometry and the sidepod, then adjusted cooling louvres, the mirror assembly and the halo to feed it. Racing Bulls chased front-end flow conditioning with a new front wing, brake duct and front suspension parts. Audi arrived with 14 changed components, including an entirely new front wing and nose. Williams reworked the floor bodywork assembly, tail geometry, front brake duct furniture and rear suspension surfaces. Cadillac spent theirs on brake cooling ducts, front suspension fairings and the diffuser.
Mercedes, Ferrari, Alpine, Aston Martin and Haas brought nothing aerodynamically new at all.
That split is not complacency. It is accounting. Mercedes sit on 503 constructors’ points to Ferrari’s 358 and McLaren’s 306, and Antonelli leads Russell 292 to 211 in the drivers’ standings. Under the cost cap, every Baku-specific louvre is money and wind tunnel time subtracted from a 2027 car. When you already own the strongest package and the largest points buffer of the season, the rational move is to stop developing and start banking. The teams still bolting things on are the ones whose 2026 is already settled, and Audi’s 14 parts are a message about next year rather than this weekend.
There is a timing oddity worth flagging too. Baku is a miserable place to learn anything about a new floor. The surface is bumpy, ride height is compromised by kerb strikes, the rear wing is trimmed out for the long full-throttle run to Turn 1, and the walls punish exactly the kind of exploratory lap you need to correlate the data. Teams debut parts here because the calendar says so, not because the circuit is kind.
McLaren’s fix was a bag of cable ties
McLaren’s Thursday morning was a mess. Oscar Piastri reported vibrations within minutes and lost track time to repairs, Lando Norris sat out most of FP1 with a problem and ended the hour 14th, and both cars ran FP2 with plastic cable ties holding a floorboard fix together. Norris finished sixth, 1.484s off Russell. Piastri was eighth, 1.510s back.
A floor problem at Baku is not only a lap-time problem. Plank and skid wear is a legality item measured after a session, not a matter of opinion, and there is no “but we were quick” defence in scrutineering. Teams here run the car as low and as stiff as they dare to protect straight-line speed. A compromised floor edge either forces them to lift the car and surrender the upgrade’s benefit, or invites a post-session conversation nobody enjoys. Cable ties are a perfectly good Thursday answer. They are not a Friday answer.
The rest of Thursday was a reliability audit
Antonelli’s FP1 lasted 25 minutes before a hydraulic failure left him parked at Turn 7 behind a Virtual Safety Car. Carlos Sainz returned his heavily updated Williams to the pit lane after 15 minutes with the rear brakes on fire. Nico Hulkenberg stopped at the exit of Turn 4. Isack Hadjar, back after three rounds out with a wrist injury, lost running to a power unit issue and finished the hour 20th.
FP2 was worse. Arvid Lindblad put his Racing Bulls into the wall in the Turn 8/9 castle section inside the first 20 minutes, red-flagging the session with heavy right-hand-side damage, his second FP2 crash in consecutive events after Madrid. Moments after the restart, Ollie Bearman’s Haas engine, in his own description, switched off and broke. Fernando Alonso’s afternoon was curtailed by a suspected oil leak.
None of that is coincidence. Baku’s brake energy demand is among the highest of the year, which is precisely why Cadillac spent their upgrade allowance on brake cooling capacity, and the long throttle application into Turn 1 cooks the internal combustion engine and cycles the energy store harder than almost anywhere else. Bearman’s failure is the expensive one. Haas sit seventh with 21 points and Bearman has scored 18 of them. An unplanned power unit component at round 15, with eight rounds still to run, is a grid penalty you pay later rather than a problem you solve now. If you want the arithmetic behind that, here is how F1 calculates grid penalties for power unit changes.
Aston Martin already know where they are starting
Aston Martin decided to stop paying that bill in instalments. Alonso takes a fresh internal combustion engine, his fifth against a season allocation of four, plus a fifth turbocharger and a ninth power unit ancillary component against an allowance of six. Lance Stroll moves onto a sixth turbocharger, seventh energy store, sixth control electronics unit and eighth ancillary. The FIA confirmed penalties of 25 grid places for Alonso and 20 for Stroll.
Here is the useful part. Once a driver’s cumulative penalty passes 15 places, they start from the back regardless, so every element taken beyond that threshold is effectively free. Aston have emptied the shelf in one hit at a circuit where overtaking genuinely happens, which is the least painful version of a bad outcome and the same logic behind the engine trade they made in Madrid. Both cars were last and second-last in FP2 anyway, more than four seconds off Russell. Friday’s qualifying result is academic for them.
Antonelli lost the one thing Baku charges most for
An 81-point cushion is enormous, and eight wins from 14 starts explains how it got there. Thursday still cost Antonelli something a points lead does not cover: laps. He missed more than half of FP1 and was 0.552s adrift in FP2 on matching soft tyres, his best a 1m 43.899s. At a circuit where the margin between a pole lap and a bent suspension arm is a few centimetres of steering input, reference laps are the currency, and he banked fewer of them than anyone else in the top six. We set out what this weekend asks of Antonelli’s championship lead before the cars ran.
Russell, meanwhile, has quietly assembled the strongest single day of his season. His FP1 benchmark of 1m 45.387s came with a tow down the main straight. His FP2 best, two hours later, was 2.040s quicker, most of that gain simply rubber going down on a surface drivers called dusty and slippery when the pit lane opened. More striking still: 1m 43.347s sits 0.338s off Charles Leclerc’s outright Baku record of 1m 43.009s from 2019. That is a practice lap, on a green street circuit, with a heavier ruleset. Friday evening’s qualifying should erase the record comfortably.
What Friday actually decides
Baku’s 2026 schedule is compressed, with FP3 at 1230 local and qualifying at 1600 on Friday before a Saturday race. One hour of running separates the paddock from a grid, and overnight repairs carry a much higher cost than usual. Lindblad goes into FP3 with a rebuilt car and barely any representative mileage, which matters for a Racing Bulls team sitting fifth on 77 points, only nine clear of Alpine, and juggling a line-up in flux: Liam Lawson is back from a Red Bull stint, while Hadjar, the driver Red Bull have already signed for 2027, was ninth in FP2 on his return from three rounds out.
Watch Verstappen’s ride quality. His complaint in FP2 was specific: constant counter-steering because the rear axle kept leaving the ground. That is a kerb-and-bump compliance problem at a track built almost entirely out of kerbs and bumps, and Red Bull’s new floor and sidepod are designed to add local load. If the car cannot use the kerbs, the load never arrives. Third and 0.827s is respectable, but Red Bull have not won a race in 2026, and Baku’s low-drag layout is one of the few remaining venues that flatters their package.
Watch the midfield upgrade scoreboard as well. Audi’s 14 new parts produced 14th and 15th for Gabriel Bortoleto and Hulkenberg. Williams’ new floor produced 16th and 17th for Alex Albon and Sainz, a team that has not scored since Monaco in June. If neither package appears in Q1 on Friday, both have effectively spent the last of their 2026 development budget on a data-gathering exercise.
And watch the timing screens for the thing that is not a gap. Mercedes went one-two in the only session run in something close to qualifying conditions, at a circuit they were not targeting, with the same car they raced in Madrid. That is the most uncomfortable number on the sheet for everyone else.
About the Author
