Photo: Lukas Raich, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Max Verstappen’s first win of 2026 took 55 laps, two Safety Cars, a Virtual Safety Car and a start that ran 90 minutes late. It was effectively won in about 30 seconds of pit-lane work on lap 9, when Red Bull bolted Soft tyres onto both RB22s and Mercedes put Mediums on Kimi Antonelli and George Russell. Everything after that was Verstappen cashing the cheque.
The Bahrain Grand Prix, relocated to Malaysia’s Sepang International Circuit this year, ended with Verstappen 2.307 seconds clear of Antonelli, with Lewis Hamilton third and Charles Leclerc fourth. It is the 72nd win of his career, his first since Abu Dhabi last December, and the first for Red Bull Ford Powertrains in the team’s debut season as its own engine maker. Nine years after he won the last Malaysian Grand Prix of Sepang’s original F1 run, he picked up where he left off.
A start that ran 90 minutes late
The race was scheduled for 15:00 local time. A thunderstorm arrived first. Race Control held the start for more than 40 minutes, then sent the field off behind the Safety Car, and that is where things got odd. Several cars struggled on the formation laps: Verstappen briefly slowed, Hamilton almost stopped, and Liam Lawson never left his grid box. Ferrari’s post-race report blamed a “widespread software issue,” and Mercedes described a formation lap aborted because several cars had problems. The cars went back to the pit lane, officials reset the grid to the original qualifying order, and the race finally got going at 16:30.
Neither team said which software, and the FIA has not published anything on the cause, so the useful takeaway for now is the procedural one. Reverting to the original grid was the cleanest answer to a mess where some drivers had passed stricken cars on a lap that never counted. Expect this to come up again in team briefings before Singapore. A 2026 power unit that misbehaves at crawling speed behind a Safety Car is not something anyone wants to rediscover at Marina Bay.
Two tyre calls, two outcomes
By 16:30 the rain had stopped, and the grid split. Red Bull and Mercedes started on Intermediates. Ferrari started both cars on Softs. Pierre Gasly sliding off on slicks during the laps behind the Safety Car hinted at how that would go, and it went exactly that way. Leclerc made contact with Nico Hulkenberg on lap 1, needed a new front wing, and switched to Intermediates. Hamilton dropped down the order on a track that was still too wet for his tyres. Fred Vasseur said afterwards that Ferrari “got the call wrong” because it lacked the full picture of track conditions.
Up front, Verstappen had a bad launch from pole and fell behind both Mercedes before the field cleared Turn 3. He passed Russell on lap 6 and was all over Antonelli’s gearbox when Valtteri Bottas parked his Cadillac in the gravel on lap 9. The Safety Car came out, and almost every Intermediate runner pitted on the same lap.
That was the split that mattered. The official pit stop summary shows Antonelli and Verstappen stopping one second apart, Russell right behind them and Isack Hadjar 14 seconds later. Red Bull fitted Softs, and Mercedes fitted Mediums. On a track drying out from a tropical downpour, with a Safety Car restart coming up, the softer compound gets to temperature sooner. That’s precisely when a driver who’s been sitting a second behind the leader for three laps wants grip.
The Safety Car came in at the end of lap 12. Verstappen went around the outside of Antonelli into Turn 1, had the inside line for Turn 2, and that was the lead. Antonelli then lost second to Russell at Turn 4, and Russell said later that he “felt much better once we were on the Soft compound.” That’s about as clear an admission as a team report gets.
Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin talked about “several important decisions around tyre choice and crossover points.” Read alongside the timing, his comment amounts to a team admitting that the Medium was a defensive choice on a day that rewarded attack.
The Baku floor kept paying off
The tyre call explains the lead change. The car explains why Verstappen pulled away once he had it. Red Bull brought what its FIA car presentation filing for Azerbaijan lists as a new floor body and diffuser and a revised sidepod with a new split line to the floor. Both were declared as chasing “local load.” The same package included reshaped cooling louvres to blend with the sidepod, plus new mirrors and a tweaked halo turning vane for flow conditioning further back. A floor upgrade of this kind is meant to add downforce without making the car twitchy, which helps most on fast, flowing corners like Sepang’s Turns 5 and 6.
Saturday suggested the upgrade worked. Verstappen took pole by 0.298 seconds over Hamilton, and Hadjar qualified third. The best Mercedes, Antonelli’s, was fourth, half a second off pole. On Sunday, Verstappen led Russell by 3.5 seconds by lap 20 and by 8.3 at half distance. He kept a 10-second lead after his second stop, a switch to fresh Softs at the end of lap 33. For good measure, he set the fastest lap of the race, a 1:38.220, on the final lap.
Ferrari’s wrong tyre turned out right
Here’s the twist in Ferrari’s afternoon. Starting on Softs looked terrible on lap 1, but by lap 9 the track had dried enough for them to work. While the Intermediate runners queued in the pit lane under the Safety Car, Hamilton stayed out. The pit stop summary has his first stop on lap 31. That’s one Soft stint lasting more than half the race, which saved him a stop everyone in front of him had to make, and it carried him from the back half of the field into contention.
Leclerc’s recovery was harder. He made four stops, including the lap-1 wing change, and still finished fourth. Ferrari now has its tenth podium of the season and Hamilton his sixth. Vasseur’s comments on structure and accountability are already a live subject in Maranello, and a frank “we got the call wrong” in a team report is a small sign that it is taking its own mistakes seriously.
The final part of the comeback came with a late Safety Car. Alex Albon’s Williams stopped with a gearbox failure, which brought out a Virtual Safety Car on lap 43, and Verstappen, Hamilton, Russell and Hadjar pitted. Antonelli inherited the lead, but the VSC became a full Safety Car and he pitted for Softs, so the order was back where it had been. At the restart after lap 51, Hamilton passed Hadjar into Turn 1, and Leclerc did the same a lap later. Hadjar, who spun on a formation lap and started eighth after a five-place power unit penalty, struggled with understeer and finished fifth.
Russell’s bad afternoon, and the points that moved
Russell was third and coasting toward a podium when he stopped near the pit exit during that last Safety Car. Mercedes reported a suspected power unit problem. Toto Wolff described it as the team’s worst weekend of the season and added, without softening it, that Mercedes “were not quick enough, and we were not reliable enough.” That’s a striking line from the team leading the constructors’ standings, and it lands while Mercedes is already weighing when to fit fresh power unit hardware to Russell’s car.
The FIA’s updated standings show the damage. Antonelli leads on 320 points and Russell has 236, so the gap between the Mercedes drivers has grown from 66 to 84 with seven rounds left. We worked through why Russell could win every remaining race and still lose this title before Sepang. Losing 18 more points to his teammate in one afternoon makes that maths worse. Hamilton is third on 214. Verstappen’s 25 points put him level with Lando Norris on 188, and Norris left Sepang with a reprimand for erratic driving behind the Safety Car. In the constructors’ table, Mercedes leads Ferrari by 151 points. Red Bull, on 298, is 18 behind McLaren for third.
What to watch at Marina Bay
Singapore, round 17, comes next Sunday to finish the triple-header, and it tests whether Sepang was about tyres and the weather or about the RB22’s development. Marina Bay is slow, bumpy and full of walls, nothing like Sepang’s sweepers, so the Baku floor will be judged on a different kind of downforce. Watch three things: whether Red Bull’s single-lap advantage over Mercedes holds on a street circuit, whether Mercedes changes anything on Russell’s power unit after Sunday’s failure, and whether the formation-lap software problem shows up in the stewards’ or Race Director’s documents before the cars run. To see how much one wet afternoon moved things, compare today’s table with our pre-Sepang notebook.
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