Red Bull celebrate as Perez wins a low-thrills race in Baku (Picture: Shutterstock)
Sometimes you get a duff race, and a week later you’re repaid with an absolute banger. Well, let’s see.
Toto Wolff, of course one of the main beneficiaries of Mercedes’ dominance, says F1 needs to stop faffing around with format changes like sprints and shootouts and focus on improvements to the racing on Sundays.
‘Today wasn’t a thriller,’ admitted the Austrian after Sergio Perez triumphed at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, where Mercedes pair Lewis Hamilton and George Russell were sixth and eighth.
‘Just no overtaking. It made it not great entertainment. It needs the tough battles, and I think the highlight [in the sprint] was George [Russell] and Max [Verstappen] being able to battle it out.
‘There was none of that in the main race. Even if you are within 0.2 of a second, it is nearly impossible to overtake unless the other driver makes a mistake. We need to really look at it, we need to look at how we can avoid just a boring race.
‘It’s about understanding why it was not entertaining. We have two cars that are sailing off into the sunset on merit and then we have a 20-second gap.’
Having a shorter DRS zone this year in Baku didn’t help but the main issue appears to be the changes to the floor of the cars that were brought in to reduce ‘porpoising’ and the general advancement the teams have made in recapturing downforce. As a result, the cars are harder to follow than in 2022.
It is surely the mark of a very boring race when a driver pitting from tenth is the highlight.
Verstappen was denied victory thanks to a shunt courtesy of Nyck de Vries. This enabled Perez to claim his second victory in two days, having won the Saturday sprint race too.
On both occasions, Charles Leclerc was on pole. Once again, though, Red Bull had unbeatable race pace.
That’s four wins and three one-twos from four rounds for the Milton Keynes team. The Mexican is just six points adrift of Verstappen.
If Perez can keep winning every other race, then maybe we can have a title fight between team-mates, but the performance gulf between Red Bull and everyone else on the grid dwarfs that of Mercedes’ dominance in 2014 and 2015 off the back of the last major change to the technical regs.
Team boss Christian Horner expects the results between his drivers to continue to ebb and flow.
‘At the moment it’s [just between] the two of them, but there’s 19 more races to go and five sprints,’ he said.
‘There’s a whole variance of different circuits to go through. Reliability is a key factor. And what we’re more focused on as well as the moment is building a buffer with both of the drivers, because when we get back to Europe, I’m sure there’s going to be sizeable upgrades [for other teams].’
Horner confirmed both Perez and Verstappen are free to race each other for the time being: ‘They both want to win, which is why they’re employed by the team. It’s down to what they do on the track. They’ve been free to race all year so far.’
He said that will only change ‘if the team’s interests become bigger than the drivers’.
Ocon snaps after narrowly avoiding ‘big disaster’ with photographers
Onlookers flee as Esteban Ocon comes in for his last-lap stop (Pictures: Sky Sports)
For anyone wanting to find some excitement in Baku, there was some right at the end.
Esteban Ocon charged into the pits on the final lap to take a tyre change everyone should have known was coming, because if the Frenchman hadn’t switched to a new compound he would have been disqualified.
He had been making his first set of hard Pirellis last as long as possible, goal-hanging in the hope of a safety car that would give him a free stop. But with no last-minute incident in a race that, until this point, had been like watching paint dry, the Alpine arrived in the pitlane for a set of softs as dozens of photographers and circuit staff milled around in anticipation of the parc ferme and podium celebrations.
Esteban Ocon was not impressed by the near miss (Picture: Getty)
It is normal for photographers to get into their position on the last lap but the FIA should have policed the pit entry and the photographers’ delegate should have been on hand to stop snappers crossing the live track.
That did not happen and it’s quite lucky no one got kneecapped by an F1 car.
Ocon was unimpressed. ‘I’m arriving at 300kph, braking very late and I see people around. This is crazy, it could have been a big, big one,’ he said. ‘If I miss the braking point it’s a big disaster.’
There was an immediate investigation, carried out, of course, by the FIA. Several FIA personnel were summoned. Then the governing body marked its own homework and said it would do better next time.
‘The FIA representatives expressed their regret at what happened,’ read a statement from the stewards, adding they ‘assured us’ they’d ‘take immediate steps’ to review procedures and protocols to ensure the situation doesn’t arise again.
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A Red Bull one-two but boss says it was ‘no thriller’.