Kimi Antonelli has a commanding lead in the F1 championship as Baku marks the start of the first of three triple-headers
Sam Bloxham/LAT
Formula 1 returns to Baku this weekend, opening the first of three triple-headers scheduled to end the 2026 season.
With Kimi Antonelli having increased his gap in the standings in the last two races at Monza and Madrid, the championship picture looks almost settled unless his rivals make a significant dent in the upcoming three events.
McLaren will continue to push with the introduction of more updates, but it remains to be seen how on-form Lando Norris performs at a circuit that hasn’t been very favourable in the past.
Here’s what to look out for at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend.
For the past month and a half, Lando Norris has been pretty much the only story in the 2026 Formula 1 title fight that wasn’t about Andrea Kimi Antonelli.
Back-to-back wins in Hungary and Zandvoort – the first driver other than Antonelli to string two together all season — cut the gap at the top to 83 points and raised the question of whether a comeback was actually possible now McLaren had found enough pace to match and beat Mercedes.
Two races later, that gap is 106 points, after not having enough pace to match Antonelli at Monza and then losing out to the Italian as a result of an unlucky virtual safety car in Madrid.
The triple-header could put an end to the championship fight
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There are, on paper, nine events left on the calendar, and most of Antonelli’s rivals appear on the brink of conceding defeat.
Baku is the start of their last chance. The current triple-header, which continues with the Bahrain Grand Prix (staged at Sepang in Malaysia) next weekend, then on to Singapore, is the final opportunity to cut the deficit to the championship leader before the gap becomes unrealistic to overcome in the six races that will remain.
The recent memory of Max Verstappen‘s comeback victory in the 2025 Azerbaijan Grand Prix makes the idea of a repeat sound more reasonable than it is, but the reality of this year’s competitive order is different in two important ways.
First, Mercedes still has aces up its sleeve: unreleased upgrades on both the chassis and power-unit side, and once the development cycle catches up across the field, the team may find itself alone at the top again regardless of McLaren’s summer surge.
Second, where last year Verstappen was fighting the two McLarens almost exclusively in the run-in, this year the chasing pack is split five ways.
Verstappen, George Russell, Lewis Hamilton, Charles Leclerc and Oscar Piastri are all still factors in the races, even if none has been fighting for wins consistently — and a title fight with five potential beneficiaries of any Antonelli slip-up is a much harder one to actually close.
The truth is Antonelli’s title is starting to look close to a formality, and the possibility that the season loses at least one more round to the ongoing Iran war — Qatar and Abu Dhabi’s places on the calendar are not guaranteed — only tilts things further his way, requiring his pursuers to outscore him by an even greater amount each race.
Which brings the focus back to what actually happens on track at Baku.
Norris’s two results since Zandvoort tell different stories: Madrid, where he led from pole before the VSC intervened, said a lot about his incredible current form.
Monza, where he was blunt that McLaren could not live with Mercedes’ straight-line pace, said something about his car’s weaknesses — and Baku’s 1.4 mile (2.2km) run to Turn 1, the longest flat-out straight on the calendar, might prove an even harder version of the same test.
McLaren is bringing what it has billed as a “substantial” upgrade package this weekend, at a track that treated it badly 12 months ago, when Norris came out a distant seventh.
Norris needs to make a real dent on Antonelli this weekend or his last semi-realistic chance to keep the title conversation open will be pretty much closed.
Nobody arrives at this weekend with more riding on it, relative to how little anyone expects, than Williams.
Williams hasn’t scored a single point since Monaco
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After a 2025 that promised a genuine return to the midfield’s front and a 2026 that has delivered almost the opposite, Baku is where the team finally introduces the major FW48 upgrade it has spent months building toward.
The season since Monaco has been extremely bleak: five points finishes in the opening rounds, capped by an eighth for Alex Albon there, and nothing at all since – both cars have largely been stuck around 15th to 17th, roughly a second a lap off the midfield pace they were matching earlier in the year.
The planned upgrade was signed off with genuinely promising numbers behind it, but the rest of the midfield hasn’t stood still while Williams waited.
Albon has pointed out that rival teams are now bringing three or four major updates a season rather than the usual one or two, in packages far larger than they used to be, and that in a normal year the Baku update would have put the team back in contention.
That the car should still be a clear step forward is not really in doubt. Whether it’s enough of one to matter is the actual question hanging over the weekend as well as the rest of the season.
Twelve months ago, Baku was Williams’ best result of the year, with Carlos Sainz qualifying second and finishing third.
Arriving at a street circuit that has previously suited the car just as a genuine upgrade finally lands offers the best possible pairing of opportunity and timing, but it could be a cruel reminder of exactly how far the team has fallen if it doesn’t work.
The lap times are not really the only thing being tested this weekend, though.
Team principal James Vowles has traced this year’s problems back to gaps in Williams’ winter processes: simulation tools that came online too late and aerodynamic development that went in the wrong direction without the modelling to catch it before it was built.
He’s brought in new senior hires since, specifically to close those gaps before the new car is locked in for 2027.
A Baku upgrade that delivers close to its predicted gains would be the first real evidence that the fixes are working.
One that underperforms again would be a far harder story to spin: for Vowles, for the drivers he only recently persuaded to commit to the team’s future, and for the credibility of the rebuild itself.
Having joined the F1 calendar in 2016, Baku doesn’t have much grand prix history to draw on, but the one it does have is a strange one, as the venue is the last circuit to have held the European Grand Prix, despite being in Asia.
The European GP has never been a fixed race so much as a floating title that Formula 1 has reached for whenever a country needed a second event in a season, or a new circuit needed a name before it had earned a national one.
The start of the first F1 race in Baku
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Over 23 runnings, the honour has gone to the Nürburgring 12 times, Valencia five, Brands Hatch and Jerez twice each, and Donington Park once.
In 2016, with Azerbaijan not yet ready to put its own name on the race, it went to Baku instead. As of this weekend, 10 years on, they still haven’t been used again.
Despite the venue changing over the years, the European Grand Prix always at least nominally stood for the idea that the race would take place in Europe. Baku changed that.
The Baku City Circuit sits close enough to the line separating Europe from Asia that Azerbaijan itself is routinely described as transcontinental; depending on which convention you use, this race weekend is being held partly, or entirely, in Asia.
The most recent race to carry F1’s most European-sounding title took place in one of the least conventionally European locations it has ever visited.
There’s no rule against using the name so it might come back one day, although there are no obvious reasons for Formula 1 to revive it either, since the calendar’s expansion means countries rarely need a second race under a different banner anymore.
It’s a strange kind of history for a circuit to hold, but, as it turned out, less of a one-off quirk than it looks.
A race name detached from its actual location is happening again this year, just one round later: the Bahrain Grand Prix is being held not in Bahrain but at Sepang, in Malaysia.
With the calendar set to change again due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, don’t be surprised if it isn’t the last odd name to turn up in the wrong place before the season is out.
