What was behind Verstappen’s curiously poor Baku weekend?

Formula 1 fans were treated to an unfamiliar sight in Baku as Max Verstappen was outqualified by Red Bull team-mate Sergio Perez for the first time in 33 races, before being well beaten in the race. How did the world champion’s weekend go so wrong?

It was particularly odd that the Azerbaijan Grand Prix ended up being Perez’s best race in 18 months, and that the Mexican was genuinely in contention for the win when his otherwise dominant team-mate Verstappen struggled.

Baku came off the back of a bruising period for Red Bull as car balance issues introduced in May caused a slide F1’s formerly dominant team struggled to arrest, with Verstappen now winless for seven races while McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes all grabbed victories.

Having driven a “monster” in Monza, Baku offered glimpses that Red Bull had understood the crippling handling issues that initially derailed Perez’s campaign and then started affecting Verstappen.

Perez had been on the back foot after Friday practice at most weekends this season, struggling to find solutions to turn the car set-up around to suit his style. But aided by a tweaked floor design, in Baku the Mexican was much happier and that confidence extended to qualifying where he claimed fourth, outperforming Verstappen for the first time since the 2023 Miami Grand Prix.

But while Perez found a solid set-up, Verstappen’s side of the garage went in a different direction and according to the Dutchman had “tipped it over the edge” of what was driveable.

“As soon as I went out in Q1, I just felt the car took a step back,” Verstappen explained on Saturday. “We made some changes and the car just became incredibly unpredictable and difficult.

“That caused a lot of bouncing in the back of the car when turning in and out of a corner. I had too much oversteer, and you don’t want that on a street circuit.”

Because of F1’s parc ferme rules, Verstappen was largely stuck with what he had, with the suspension set-up in particular being frozen as any changes would have meant a pitlane start.

It didn’t take long for Verstappen’s issues to resurface during the race. He craftily passed Mercedes’ George Russell at the start for fifth, but then struggled to keep up with the pace of Ferrari man Carlos Sainz in front, complaining over the team radio that the car had “zero bite” and struggled to navigate Baku’s tight 90-degree corners.

Following his only pitstop he was then unable to pass hard-tyre starter Lando Norris, being overtaken by Russell instead. After Norris’ later stop, the Briton clawed back a pitstop worth of race time to easily repass Verstappen for what turned out to be fourth place.

“I think we just paid the price with the change that we made into qualifying,” Verstappen explained. “That made it just really difficult to drive.

“The car was jumping around a lot. The wheels were coming off the ground in the low-speed corners, so when you don’t have a contact patch with the tarmac, it’s very difficult.

“You win and lose as a team. We thought it would be a good direction to go into and at the end, it wasn’t.”

Christian Horner, Team Principal, Red Bull Racing, Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

Verstappen pointed out the new floor design did improve his car behaviour before the wrong set-up change, so the weekend wasn’t an unmitigated disaster in the wider context of the season and Red Bull’s long-term performance.

“The car did feel a bit better than what we had before, the overall behaviour is better. It’s just that you always try to make changes to make the car even better but unfortunately what we did made it worse,” he said.

“I had the connection with the car but then unfortunately with the change we made we lost it again. But the race showed that with Checo, when he was a bit happier, the car was performing a bit better. We are in that fight.”

Team principal Christian Horner suggested Verstappen’s set-up choice had a negative impact on his tyre wear, especially when he was stuck behind hard-tyre starters Alex Albon and Norris.

“Checo’s car was very quick, I think we might have introduced something to Max’s car that didn’t work as well and probably damaged the tyres quite a lot fighting in that group for such a long period of time,” Horner told Sky Sports F1.

“If you look at Russell’s stint he started very, very slowly and then just builds into it and has a better tyre at the end, so yes, really very, very frustrating.”

“There’ll be a big post-mortem to see what the variances between the two cars are, which are obviously reasonably subtle. But he was not as comfortable as Checo was, so obviously we need to get into that to understand why.”

Given that team-mate Oscar Piastri won the race, Baku may still feel like a bigger opportunity missed for Norris than it was for Verstappen. But every point is going to count, especially as F1 heads to Red Bull’s Achilles heel in Singapore this week, which will likely be another round of damage limitation.

But despite Norris beating him to fourth from 15th on the grid, Verstappen said he wasn’t too upset by conceding three points to the McLaren driver given the calamitous car behaviour he dealt with. “It’s probably positive for me,” he added as the gap came down to 59 points with seven races remaining.

“I would have liked to extend the gap, but with our race, I’m so happy that it was only that.

“What can I do for Singapore? Well, we’re trying to optimise the set-up to understand what we did wrong here. I don’t think it’s going to be our best track, naturally, but we’ll see. It might surprise us.

“It’s never nice to see [McLaren leading the constructors’ standings]. But the fight is not over yet. We’ll try to get that back.”