3 days Ago By Oliver Harden
McLaren driver Oscar Piastri claimed his second victory of the F1 2024 season in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in Baku. Piastri ‘s win helped McLaren take the lead of the Constructors’ Championship, with Ferrari driver and polesitter Charles Leclerc forced to settle for second and Mercedes driver George Russell in third. Here are our conclusions from Azerbaijan.
.. Sport? It’s not about the body, but the mind.
At least it is at the elite level. With the overall talent level at the upper limits of the capabilities of the human body, with the differences in ability from one athlete to the next so fine, it is the one whose technique holds firm and remains accessible under pressure who often wins. It is in this area – call it temperament, call it nerve, call it certainty – where you will find the intrinsic difference between the two McLaren drivers.
Put simply, if Oscar Piastri knows that he belongs, Lando Norris, with his poor starts, errors at critical moments and heart worn on his sleeve, has always needed some convincing that he does too. For most of their time as team-mates Norris has held a small but significant advantage over Piastri, owing largely to his greater experience and his fuller understanding of the Pirelli tyres, a key element of modern F1 notoriously tricky for young drivers to get to grips with. Yet now Piastri is growing stronger by the race – his data banks expanding, his confidence building, his weaknesses disappearing – the point has now been reached where Norris will not be able to contain him for much longer.
And this just as McLaren were leaning towards casting Piastri in a support role for the remainder of the season...
👉 F1 2024: Head-to-head qualifying record between team-mates 👉 F1 2024: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates Much has been made over the last 18 months of the parallels between Piastri and Max Verstappen and the way Oscar too has a former F1 driver in his corner – Mark Webber, like Jos, putting into practice the mistakes of his own career to make his protege the toughest, most complete competitor he can possibly be. This, Piastri’s second career victory, was a win of which Verstappen himself, that great mentality monster, would be proud, seizing brilliantly and decisively the only chance he had to pass Leclerc and then nervelessly repelling Charles’ efforts to get the lead back. For lap after lap he absorbed the pressure and tried his best to ignore the Ferrari darting around in his mirrors, concentrating on perfecting the braking zones, creating as big a gap as possible before the DRS detection zones and covering the inside of Turn 1, something Leclerc had inexplicably failed to do in the decisive moment of the race.
Right until the moment the Ferrari’s rear tyres cried enough with a couple of laps to go, freeing Piastri (whose appreciation for the power of clean air, it has become apparent, is matched only by Fernando Alonso) to escape to a beautifully measured victory. Finally seeing what everyone else saw on Saturday night on Monza, McLaren belatedly began talking up their F1 2024 title chances heading to Baku, indicating a preparedness to support Norris where possible – but only in specific circumstances, you see – in that classic muddled McLaren way of doing things. Yet the real motivating factor for the team right now is positioning themselves for the beginning of next season, when there will be no headstart for Red Bull as the points reset to zero and, if the current competitive picture is maintained, McLaren will start as title favourites.
On current evidence, if there is one McLaren driver who could effortlessly reel off a string of victories to open 2025, and then cope with the unique pressure and scrutiny that comes with being exposed to a World Championship battle for the first time, it’s not Norris. Piastri? He ain’t nobody’s number two. And he might just prove McLaren’s best bet for next season.
So what is it that makes Sergio Perez so good in Baku? How can a driver uninspiring for large sections of each given season be so impressive at one of the most challenging and daunting circuits of them all, combining the speeds of Monza with the walls of Monaco? It finally made sense with his victory here last year: it’s all about Sector 1 and those four 90-degree corners at the beginning of the lap, almost tailor-made to his technique. With his feather-light touch of the throttle, Perez manages to be just as quick – and sometimes even quicker – than Verstappen in Sector 1 while taking less energy from his tyres, leaving him in better shape for the crucial traction zones later in the lap. So it was once again on Saturday, when Perez was fastest of all – and 0.
248s quicker than his team-mate – in the first sector in qualifying. He was actually marginally slower than Max in Sector 2, and ranked 17th of the 20 drivers in the final sector, yet even Verstappen was unable to overturn the advantage Perez had established in the opening phase of the lap. It may have ended messily as he and Carlos Sainz tangled fighting over Leclerc’s slipstream, yet this weekend was a great leap forward for Perez both in the context of his season and his hopes of retaining his Red Bull seat for at least the rest of F1 2024.
Recall that in his address to the Red Bull workforce in late July to confirm that Perez would be kept on after the summer break, Christian Horner made the point that the team were “looking forward to seeing him perform at circuits where he’s done well before” – a clear reference to Baku and Singapore, the two races by which Perez will be judged. Red Bull seemed set to drop Sergio Perez after Spa, then the surprise call was made to keep him. What changed? ✍️ @ThomasMaherOnF1 https://t.
co/DBGXK5Wxzn #F1 #RedBull #SergioPerez pic.twitter.com/HUIJtIDHHT — PlanetF1 (@Planet_F1) August 2, 2024 It emerged not long after the season resumed at Zandvoort last month that Perez called upon the help of Rob Wilson, the esteemed driver coach who once mentored the likes of Kimi Raikkonen and Nico Rosberg among others and is probably the most influential individual in F1 not widely known among the public, to rebuild his driving style over the summer break.
It is amusing to picture the scene of a bemused Perez sat behind the wheel of Wilson’s Vauxhall Astra at a rainy Silverstone in mid-August as an elderly man teaches him the ‘flat car’ philosophy (effectively minimising the amount of load in the car at any given point), as well as the importance of weight transfer, supple inputs and coming off the brake pedal at exactly the right rate. It takes great humility for a driver of Perez’s experience and stature – a winner of multiple grands prix for Red Bull and the most successful F1 driver in his nation’s history, remember – to acknowledge that shortcomings do exist in his driving and to commit to ironing out the bad habits he has developed along the way. It may have not been the result he had at this place last year – maybe it was never going to be with Red Bull in their current state – but rest assured that Perez is in very good hands.
And right up until the bitter end in Baku, it showed. Adrian Newey’s tone was dismissive to the point of disinterested. During one of his several podcast appearances released last week to coincide with the announcement of his move to Aston Martin, Newey was invited to piece together the puzzle of Red Bull’s mid-2024 woes.
His response? “I don’t know, because I’m not involved.” There is an irresistible temptation to join the dots here, for it is undeniable that Red Bull have not been the same since Newey announced just days before the Miami Grand Prix in early May that he will leave the team in early 2025. Yet surely – surely – the loss of one individual, no matter how gifted, cannot bring a team to its knees.
Or can it? It is not so much the calming, steady hand of Newey himself that Red Bull are missing as much as his experience and expertise, which became clear as the news of his switch to Aston Martin sank in over the Baku weekend. Throughout the current ground-effect era, engineering teams have faced the challenge of adding downforce to the car without inducing some undesirable characteristics, the porpoising phenomenon being the most notable. Every team has been left confused at some point since 2022 by this very delicate downforce/driveability trade off, yet it is telling that the Red Bull only fell out of its driver-friendly zone once Newey ceased involvement with the F1 operation for good.
Despite his reputation as a no-compromise tech genius, among Newey’s greatest strengths is his ability to recognise that the machine means nothing without the man sitting at the heart of it. He is as much a race engineer, talking to the drivers and understanding what exactly they need from the car out on track, as he is a designer of great racing cars and to picture him locked away with his pencil deep inside the bowels of the factory, disconnected from everything but his drawing board, is to sell him short. Have Red Bull overlooked that critical relationship between the nuts and bolts and the flesh and blood in his absence? And, in doing so, fallen into the classic, Mercedes zero-pod trap of chasing raw numbers in the wind tunnel at the expense of usable, efficient downforce? Pierre Waché, effectively Newey’s successor as Red Bull’s technical leader, admitted as much in an exclusive interview with PlanetF1.
com at Spa, conceding the team “had created some characteristics that are not designed for the driver” by pushing the boundaries “maybe too much” with the RB20. Might that be why Verstappen, as Helmut Marko recently revealed, made the point of telling the team at Monza that he does not need an extra 20 points of downforce if it makes the car undriveable? It is hard to believe that Red Bull would have led themselves down this maddening path had Newey still been involved today. It was difficult to understand Williams’ logic when the decision was made to replace Logan Sargeant with Franco Colapinto for the rest of the season in the days after the Dutch Grand Prix.
With the Williams now a car worthy of scoring points, James Vowles declared, the team simply need two drivers capable of finishing in the top 10 on at least a semi-regular basis. No point-scoring opportunity can be left to go to waste from here. Yet to parachute in a rookie driver at that stage felt almost counterproductive, as though Williams were merely swapping one set of problems for another.
Colapinto would almost certainly prove an upgrade on Sargeant, but wouldn’t this mid-season swap prove pointless – literally – if he too did not threaten to add to the team’s tally before the end of the season? It has taken just two races for Colapinto to silence those concerns, collecting four points in Azerbaijan as Williams took eighth place in the Constructors’ Championship from Alpine. True, if there were two circuits on the calendar where a driver would want to race a Williams, it would be Monza and Baku, where the low-downforce/Mercedes engine package allowed even Nyck de Vries to score points in the past, yet Colapinto’s rapid adjustment to F1 has been deeply impressive. All the more so when you consider that he had no great track record of success in the junior categories of motor racing.
Colapinto is living proof that results in the junior series are more meaningless than ever before, with teams now more likely to hand drivers opportunities based on their direct F1 preparation work – simulator sessions, TPC testing, FP1 runs – than their performances in F2. It is why Mercedes, for instance, are comfortable promoting Andrea Kimi Antonelli as Lewis Hamilton’s successor for F1 2025 despite a relatively modest first season in the traditional feeder category, the team clearly seeing something in the boy wonder that the watching world hasn’t just yet. And Colapinto himself was a mere speck on the F1 radar right up until his practice outing at Silverstone in July, when he measured up well against Alex Albon by lapping just four tenths slower on his first appearance on a race weekend.
It works the other way, too, for there was once a time when it seemed that the long-term future of F1 would be defined by Verstappen vs Vandoorne, the dominant F2 (then GP2) champion of 2015, only for Stoffel to soon slip off the sport’s radar after two years of having the light taken from his eyes by Fernando Alonso. Increasingly, it seems a driver’s junior results are there merely to support what the sim work says, as opposed to the old-fashioned way of the sim work backing up the results. Brave new world, eh? Colapinto and Antonelli? They owe it all to Oliver Bearman.
He did all young drivers everywhere a favour back in March when, aged 18, he stepped into a Ferrari at short notice in Saudi Arabia and stroked it to seventh place, beating Norris and Hamilton in the process, as if it were the most natural thing into the world. Was that the weekend – the performance – that ultimately convinced Mercedes to gamble on Antonelli? Toto Wolff spoke glowingly of Bearman that weekend, gushing about him as if he was looking at a Mercedes junior sensation. And you know what? Maybe, in a strange sort of way, he was.
Watch the interview back now and you can almost see the cogs in Wolff’s head turning: if Bearman can do it, Kimi can too...
Bearman was back this weekend, in the more modest surroundings of Haas, but no less impressive and self-critical – and this time showing that he has the resilience to go along with the talent. It was a bad mistake, the one he made in FP3, backing out of Turn 1 too late and taking off the front-left wheel as he tried to steer away from the barrier. A mistake like that, at that delicate stage of the weekend, has the potential to knock the confidence out of a driver.
Yet back Bearman bounced a couple of hours later to outqualify Nico Hulkenberg, widely lauded as one of the stars of F1 2024, who started behind a team-mate on a Sunday for only the fourth time all season. Another point, to go along with the six he scored in Saudi Arabia, was a welcome bonus, putting him ahead of four full-time drivers – including Kevin Magnussen – in the Drivers’ standings for F1 2024. Although it has long been public knowledge that Bearman will race for Haas on a full-time basis next season, Magnussen is expected to return from his ban from the next race in Singapore.
Having suffered the ultimate indignity of being banned, though, is there not an argument to draw a line under Magnussen’s career now and keep Bearman in the car for the rest of the season? Now just five points behind VCARB in the Championship, the Haas hierarchy would not be human if they have not at least considered it...
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