Mechanics and TV schedulers alike were aghast at the sheer number of incidents in Formula 1 qualifying at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
Six wall impacts hard enough to bring out the red flags, plus more incidents dealt with under local yellows, meant more work in the garage – and a session which didn’t finish until almost an hour later than scheduled.
As a street track, Baku is always likely to generate a high proportion of incidents. But six red flags is a lot – a new record, passing the previous figure of five in Imola 2022 and Sao Paulo 2024. And rain only played a walk-on role in the chaos.
The prime cause will have been invisible to those watching on TV. On top of the usual pinch points where tiny imprecisions can be punished – Turns 1, 2, 3, 4, 8 and 15 – gusting winds played a significant role in increasing the difficulty factor.
F1 cars are proved out aerodynamically in wind tunnels where the air is in a steady state. In real-world conditions, sudden changes in wind speed and direction have a significant impact on downforce levels.
“This track is already hard enough without anything,” said Max Verstappen after qualifying on pole position.
“With the strong winds that we had today, the car was moving around a lot – understeer, oversteer in different places, even on the straight, going left to right. So, to basically nail everything, but also then the big interruptions that we had, it was just very tricky today.”
Oscar Piastri, McLaren, tagging the wall
Photo by: Joe Portlock / LAT Images via Getty Images
Baku’s location on the Caspian Sea coast means high winds are an almost constant feature of the Azerbaijani capital – and they’re needed to keep another Baku landmark, a national flag the size of a football pitch, fluttering. But what might not have come across to those watching qualifying on television was the powerful effect of the gusts, varying by up to 40km/h.
As well as pushing cars around on the straight, it affected judgement of turn-in points (Alex Albon put his crash at Turn 1 down to the front end of his car ‘biting’ differently from his previous laps) and braking (Lance Stroll overshot Turn 1 as a result of a tailwind, and even drivers who didn’t crash at Turn 4 described it as a lottery). The stoppages and caution flags also meant drivers struggled to complete push laps.
“The tricky thing about today was, first of all, it’s very difficult to get into a rhythm because you’re not doing laps, not finishing laps, not spending time on track,” said Carlos Sainz, who qualified second for Williams.
“Every time you have a 10-minute break in the garage, it’s always difficult to know where the track is when you go back out again, where the tyres are going to be, where the wind is going to be. So every time we’re going out again, it’s a bit of an adventure.
“And I think that’s why there were so many crashes. If you also think that F1 cars nowadays are a lot trickier to drive in the wind than in the wet, for example – it’s completely unpredictable. You need to think that a car in mid-corner depends purely on its downforce, and 30 or 40km/h of wind changes the downforce dramatically.
“And that’s what we’re getting: every lap, a different level of downforce in the corner, and it always catches people out. It caught a lot of people out today – probably the wind – and it just shows.
“I don’t think people at home understand how tough the conditions were today and how easy it was to crash. I mean, to have the 20 best drivers in the world and seven or eight of them crashing tells you how tricky the session was today.”
Alexander Albon’s Williams is craned away from Turn 1
Photo by: Kym Illman / Getty Images
Sainz’s point about the present generation of cars being more affected by wind than the previous one is interesting. The reliance on the underbody to create downforce has pushed engineers to trim as much drag as possible off the wings through the life of this ruleset. We are now at a point where, as Mercedes’ Andrew Shovlin pointed out in the FIA-mandated ‘show and tell’ tech briefing on Thursday, there is barely any DRS effect at Monza because the rear wings are so efficient in their normal state.
The current cars also have greatly opposed cornering characteristics. They arrive at the end of a straight with a massive aerodynamic loading, hence the relative stiffness of their suspension. Any variation in wind is therefore going to exercise a greater effect on their aerodynamic ecosystem.
Previous cars had more low-speed downforce and more benign springing, making them less of a handful on street circuits, though still vulnerable to significant shifts in wind speed.
Ultimately it was that element of unpredictability brought on by the winds which made the crucial difference in qualifying in Baku: little wonder that Lando Norris described Turn 4, where he smote the wall in practice and Franco Colapinto buried his Alpine in qualifying, as “one of the worst corners I’ve ever driven in my life”.
