Sergio Perez won an unusually mundane Azerbaijan Grand Prix on Sunday ahead of his teammate Max Verstappen and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc.
The result moved the Mexican driver within six points of reigning champion Verstappen in the driver’s championship as Red Bull claimed a third one-two in four races to begin the 2023 season.
The race weekend in Baku also saw the debut of Formula One’s new ‘Sprint Saturday’ format – designed to provide meaningful racing action on each day of the event.
But was it a success? We take a look at this as well as other things we learnt from the 2023 Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
Sergio Perez is the master of the streets
At the start of coronation week in the United Kingdom, it is well and truly time to crown Sergio Perez as the undisputed king of Formula One’s street circuits.
Checo won his sixth career Grand Prix on Sunday and his victory in Baku was his fifth at a street track, adding to his wins in Monaco, Singapore and earlier this season in Jeddah.
Perez, as he showed on Sunday, shines in races that require the utmost concentration and care for his tyres. This isn’t a trait he has developed at Red Bull but rather was something he already had in his arsenal back in his days with Sauber.
Unfortunately for Sergio, the entire season isn’t made up of street circuits, but you can certainly pencil him in for a few more wins this season.
‘Sprint Saturdays’ still need some work
Formula One originally introduced sprint events back in 2021 to reinvigorate qualifying – a session it had deemed too boring.
So it seems bizarre that the solution they put forward two years later is to have not one of these ‘boring’ qualifying sessions, but two.
The new format is very much high risk and low reward, especially at a highly technical street circuit such as Baku and provides almost no incentive to the teams lower down the pecking order to go out and race.
It is easy to understand why that in the era of the cost cap in Formula One that the teams were furious that Baku was used as a venue for one of the six sprint events this season.
The sprint events are crying out for a reverse grid race. It seems as if everybody knows this but nobody wants to pull the trigger and make it happen.
Nevertheless, Saturday’s Sprint Shootout was somewhat exciting. The shorter sessions resulted in intense and frequent action – the overall aim achieved in a sense – although I fear how this would work effectively at tracks such as Spa with a much longer lap.
We will next see the sprint format in action in Austria where it is likely some minor revisions will be made.
A bittersweet weekend for Ferrari
The Scuderia had by far their best weekend of 2023 in the Azerbaijani capital and yet in many ways it would have been pretty soul-destroying for the team from Maranello.
Charles Leclerc failed to convert either of the two pole positions he achieved and while he clung on to second place in Saturday’s Sprint race, Ferrari were uncompetitive in Sunday’s Grand Prix.
Still, Leclerc proved that the challenge can be brought to Red Bull on a Saturday at least. This could prove fruitful at circuits in which it is more challenging to overtake at later in the season.
The Monegasque driver said post-race that Ferrari had “maximised” their weekend, a fair but numbing assessment of the dominance of Red Bull.
FIA need to get their house in order
Perhaps the most significant moment of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix occurred on the last lap in the pit-lane when Alpine’s Esteban Ocon, who was still to make his mandatory pit stop, narrowly avoided colliding with dozens of photographers and FIA personnel who had gathered at the pit-lane entry.
The pit-lane is the most heavily policed area in Formula One, which makes it all the more extraordinary that such a circumstance could have occurred during what was very much still a live event.
The incident follows the chaos at the end of the Australian Grand Prix at the start of April, where fans were filmed almost getting onto the track at the end of the parade lap ahead of the podium celebrations.
It seems that much greater communication is needed between race control, track officials and FIA personnel to avoid similar frightening situations from arising. It was just luck and the reactions and intuition from Ocon that prevented a serious disaster from occurring in Baku on Sunday.
Formula One returns this weekend with the Miami Grand Prix.