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Pre-race uncertainties abounded after such little dry running: Would the tyres grain? Would that decide if it was a one-stop or a two? Was this going to be about undercuts around the pitstops or overcuts?
The answer to those tyre questions would be crucial to determining the fuel consumption, which no-one had properly been able to measure because of the limited representative running. Would the McLaren superiority shown in wet qualifying hold up in the dry? What ride height do you need to keep the plank legal?
But one thing you could be sure of was that Max Verstappen would maximise whatever was in that Red Bull.
He did so, from the perfect start which vaulted him into the lead from second on the grid, to trading off pace against the front tyres in the early laps, monitoring the gap, seeing off George Russell’s brief challenge and responding to a late Lando Norris charge. Topped off with a fastest lap last time which suggested Verstappen held plenty in hand.
Maybe, just maybe, the McLaren could have had race-wining pace if Norris had not run wide at Turn 1, allowing both Verstappen and Russell by. Running in dirty air and alternating attack and conservation takes a lot more from the tyres. Norris doesn’t think it would have been enough: “Even if I’d got through Turn 1 ahead, I don’t think I’d have won; Max was just too fast for us.”
But some at McLaren might disagree.
Maybe the Mercedes had race-winning pace in it, but Russell gave his tyres a hard time attacking Verstappen, especially so his second set, on which he pushed hard in the eight laps between his stop and that of Verstappen.
With what was essentially a zero-stop strategy, Kimi Antonelli in the sister car finished fourth across the line (fifth after a five-second penalty for a jumped start was applied), with significantly better pace on hard tyres 15 laps older than Russell’s.
From 17th on the grid, he beat (before the penalty) fifth place-starting Oscar Piastri’s McLaren, and after both McLarens were disqualified that became a podium, two in a row.
But Antonelli had gone out in Q1 in the wet, Russell felt spooked by a steering glitch which may have played its part in his misjudging the tyres and Norris made a mess of the start. Verstappen did none of those things.
The start – which may or not have been crucial to Verstappen’s victory – was partly about the perfect preparation Verstappen made and Norris getting himself wound up on the approach to the grid about how far behind Max was.
Whether it was part of Verstappen’s ploy to maximise the time Norris’ tyres were cooling we can’t know. But on such a cold track, good starting temperatures were even more crucial than usual.
Drivers were being instructed to do as many as five burn-outs. Norris was so preoccupied with where Verstappen was that he did only three burn outs, none of which were as aggressive as any of Verstappen’s five. Norris’ rear tyres were almost certainly significantly cooler than Verstappen’s as the start lights went out.
As Norris bogged down slightly he moved smartly to the inside to counter the Red Bull’s better acceleration, Verstappen forced to lift slightly. Easing right to open up Turn 1, the Red Bull took the lead as Norris found himself pulled out wide through the turn, having braked too late. Norris’ lost momentum as he rejoined allowed Russell alongside and up to second as they reached Turn 4.
That was the most important part of Verstappen’s race.
“It would have been interesting to see how we compared if we’d taken the lead at the start,” said McLaren’s Andrea Stella, “and been able to use the clean air. But honestly, I think Max was faster than us in pretty much all conditions.”
As for the answers to the pre-race questions, the front right tyres were prone to a little bit of graining, yes, but if controlled sensitively by the driver the mediums on which most started lasted way longer than expected, enough to comfortably do a medium/hard one-stop.
If you could get through the graining phase, it cleared up and the degradation was then linear and defined by the wear. But if you pushed too hard, too early, put too many heat spikes into them before they’d stabilised (which took around eight-nine laps for both compounds), they were slow for the rest of the stint.
That’s what happened to Russell – forcing him to make his first stop relatively early (lap 17, five laps before Norris, eight before Verstappen) and to then slow him down after a few laps on the hards.
Verstappen exited only just ahead of the Mercedes.
“I wasn’t sure that Max would be able to get his hards up to temperature so I had to go for it,” reasoned Russell.
But all it did was make him easy prey a little later for Norris, who used his superior traction out of Turn 12 to slip by using DRS on lap 34.
The undercut effect was weak simply because the new hards that most were switching to needed that careful introduction on such a cool track surface with its super-long tyre-cooling back straight. But the effect was not quite so weak that it slipped into overcut.
So Piastri was able to undercut himself past Charles Leclerc – which was particularly frustrating for the Ferrari driver because he’d managed to put a superb overtake on the McLaren into Turn 14 in the first stint, repeating exactly the move he’d put on Isack Hadjar the lap before.
Leclerc had opted before qualifying to put on a much bigger Baku-spec wing (Lewis Hamilton, starting from the back and needing to overtake, stayed with the skinny Monza wing) and in the dry the Ferrari was quick. Maybe even as quick as the McLaren and Mercedes, but its wet track performance had left Leclerc starting ninth.
Had Ferrari been a little bolder with its pit stop timing so as not to let Piastri undercut him, Leclerc feels he may have “been able to do something special”, as Russell and Norris were not too far ahead.
“But in that second stint, Oscar had the DRS of Kimi and then there was no way past," Leclerc added.
That Ferrari wing was just too big, the DRS zone too short. But had he kept his place in front of Piastri after the stops, there’d have been the chance to catch Norris before the McLaren picked up Russell’s DRS.
Antonelli had risen up the order after being rid of the sacrificial starting softs on the opening lap to meet the technicality of using two compounds and effectively then doing a zero-stop on the hards.
He did a fantastic job and on such a low-grip surface it seems his slightly oversteery style was enough to keep the strain off the fronts to allow him that combination of pace and longevity.
Piastri on new mediums could do nothing about him and only beat him in the provisional results because of a five-second penalty for a startline infringement when Antonelli’s Mercedes had crept forward by millimetres as the gantry start lights were still on.
Antonelli was aided in his progress by a bit of early attrition, all of it a result of two first corner incidents, one triggered by Liam Lawson locking up into Piastri and needing a new front wing (Fernando Alonso anticipated this and veered left into the path of Leclerc, but they each got away with the heavy contact).
The other was squarely the fault of Gabriel Bortoleto, whose optimistic Turn 1 approach took out himself and Lance Stroll and spun Pierre Gasly to the back after a great qualifying performance.
Alex Albon had no radio and then took himself out of contention by pulling out of Hamilton’s slipstream too late and damaging his wing. The other Williams of Sainz however had a good run to seventh, bundled down from fourth by faster cars around the pit stops but staying well ahead of Hadjar’s Racing Bulls, with the hard tyre-starting pair Nico Hulkenberg and Hamilton taking the final places in the top 10 on the road.
Hamilton’s first stint was good but he had no pace on the mediums subsequently and fell back from the Sauber.
Verstappen seemed particularly pleased with his 69th career victory: “Yes, because back in ’23 winning races was like ticking boxes, but now it’s not so easy.
"Today it was just about seeing how much you could push, especially in the first stint on the more fragile [medium] tyre.
“But the tyres were good today and it’s not something we’ve always been good on, but the car was working pretty well and I didn’t need to take too much out of the tyre.”
As for the answer to those other questions regarding fuel and plank wear, Norris was severely constrained in the last few laps with lift and coasting. Radio exchanges between him and engineer Will Joseph suggested excessive fuel consumption. Then the officials took a look at the planks…
