Baku again proves that it can be chaos or calmness | Racer

We saw two very different sides of the Baku City circuit during the Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend, with Saturday and Sunday fully contrasting.

The race itself lasted 1H33M for Max Verstappen to complete the victory from Lights Out to the Geroolde Vlag, while it took 1h58m before the Dutchman finally secured the pole position in qualifying.

No race this year lasted as long as Saturday’s session to put the grid in Baku, and it gave us a staring order that was particularly seductive. But how did we go from six red flags and an almost two -hour qualification, to a large prix that ran unrest after the first edge of Oscar Piastri?

There are two important reasons.

One is the tires – namely the C6 connection made by Pirelli. It is not the first time that the compound has been seen, but it does offer a challenge for the teams and drivers.

A senior engineer described it as from a different family of tires than the rest of the Pirelli range, and not the same characteristics with the C5 to C1 that are often used elsewhere. As such, running the C6 would lead to a significant change in balance and autowedergandag compared to the C5 or C4 that were also offered in Baku.

Part of the feedback was that the C6 -igniting consistency and stability on certain cars and in turn influence the trust of the driver. Even if the rubber was theoretically faster in one round in an identical, controlled environment, if a driver does not have the confidence to extract those performance, they do not get the required round time on a street circuit.

Another reason is that, in Baku, that trust and feedback from the band to the driver is particularly crucial.

The dominant corner profile on this track is a 90 -degree bend that leads to a form of straight, usually a long one. There are few corner series, so the round time is found in the corner output every time.

Get that output and you can come up with a considerable margin compared to being careful. A team source estimated that there was a 0.2s difference between a corner where a driver had herself and a where they were waiting until they knew for sure that they could come on the accelerator pedal.

The decision to apply full acceleration was described as a bet that was still at zero percent accelerator pedal was the characteristics of the majority of the corners. Instead of the role of the speed in it, it was about achieving the power and believing that the car would grasp as the downforce increased at an increasing speed.

As a reference, a more traditional approach to other corners on the calendar was described as a requirement that Bet would be done with around 80 percent accelerator pedal, just a phone call when he has to bind to the last 20 percent.

In practice, drivers often save the corner when they didn’t feel that they had everything under control on their way to the top. It showed a calculated decision that it was not even worth the least contact with the wall in a practice session, so that they would go to the run-off area. The ultimate round time did not really matter, only the car handing and setting work. By qualifying, that weighting changed, and taking the escape road would mean that there would be a round of a round when there are so few opportunities to set a time, especially in a session that often sees incidents. It resulted in drivers who are committed to the limit on the limit, sometimes discovered that they worn too much speed, or that the car does not grab as planned if they try to accelerate.

With walls on the exit there is no room anymore to solve that problem as soon as it manifests itself. Especially on the C6 band meant the lack of feedback that some drivers found that they were not getting the instructions that they were used to when it comes to grip level.

It is no surprise that the C6 was avoided by some teams during the qualification and was not seen at all during the race – nor were many of the rest of the mistakes of the weekend.

During the race, drivers know that there is no morning to try to recover if they touch a wall. They also do not need those 0.2s per corner in the same way, unless in direct wheel-to-wheel fights. With tire saving to take into account during a one-stop-race-end, a fairly simple task, but also partly required by the desire to prevent the C6 de C5 from using the left-hand margins.

As the Piastri crash demonstrated, a slight incorrect estimate and lock in windy circumstances can still have serious consequences, and the timing was no surprise. Race Start and Restarts are often the catalyst for incidents with drivers fighting on a relatively low grip surface, but if someone is neatly navigated – as was the case after the off of the championship leader – the race can settle.

Unless there is a clear tempo difference between cars, catching up can become a difficult balance, because a failure on the brakes cannot afford to fail, with zero run-off on the corner outputs than turn 16. That angle requires the best exit of everything that for the 1.3-Mijl flat to run 1, the most important thing.

The mixed raster of BAKU offered the perfect ingredients in many ways, with even a largely incident -free race that saw a surprise stage for Carlos Sainz and a tough Sunday for McLaren and Ferrari, all because of their grid positions.

The chaos came on Saturday, the calmness on Sunday, and they were corner and tire characteristics that combined with the weather to keep Bakus Jeopardy game strong.