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Red Bull driver Max Verstappen dominated the 2025 Azerbaijan Grand Prix to reinforce his position as an outside Formula 1 title threat, as points leader Oscar Piastri crashed out.
Piastri's McLaren team-mate and main rival Lando Norris struggled to capitalise on the Australian's misfortune, finishing only seventh.
It means Piastri's lead over Norris is only reduced to 25 points - a grand prix win - while Verstappen goes from 94 to 69 points back with seven rounds left.
Piastri's already uncharacteristically-untidy Baku weekend culminated in a catastrophic first lap, as he first rolled forward early - jumping the start - then dropped to last place after stop-starting as a result of his jump start.
He overtook a couple of drivers over the next few laps, then locked the left front trying to work the outside of Esteban Ocon into Turn 5 and clattered into the barriers, ending his race on the spot for his first retirement of the season.
Having led off the start - and having controlled the subsequent safety car restart - Verstappen ran a lonely race out front, leading every lap on a conventional hard-medium strategy to win by 14.6s.
While there was no intrigue at all surrounding Verstappen's race, two major battles played out behind - for the final podium spots, and in the group after that where Norris ran his race.
Williams driver Carlos Sainz held second after his front row start, but soon found himself holding off the two Mercedes drivers, with Kimi Antonelli ahead of George Russell.
Antonelli, who started on mediums to Russell's hards, had overtaken his team-mate forcefully at Turn 1, dropping Russell behind Yuki Tsunoda - but Russell swiftly reclaimed position and arrived at the back of his team-mate, eventually radioing in to Mercedes that he felt he had a better chance of taking on Sainz up ahead.
Instead of a swap, Mercedes split strategies, bringing in Antonelli for the undercut - to which Sainz responded - but leaving Russell out. And Russell's pace in his extended hard tyre stint proved good enough for him to eventually come out ahead of Sainz once he pitted, the 'overcut' securing second place.
But Sainz fought off some late pressure from Antonelli to hang on to third, marking Williams's first podium since the infamous 2021 Belgian Grand Prix.
A tense race played out behind them in the closing laps.
Norris, faced after Piastri's crash with a prime opportunity to claw massive points back on his rival, was pounced on by Charles Leclerc on the safety car restart, then found himself bottled up behind first Leclerc and then Tsunoda and having to extend a medium tyre stint to 37 laps.
With both Liam Lawson - who ran third early on after starting in that position - and Leclerc pitting early to try to undercut and not getting much out of it, Norris looked in position to potentially come out of the pits ahead of both - but a delay on the right front during his pitstop meant that was impossible.
Tsunoda came out ahead of all three after his stop, but with his tyres still not up to temperature, Lawson blasted past on DRS. Leclerc could not follow suit, though, seemingly running out of tyre life as he dropped to more than one second back from the Red Bull, allowing Norris to get ahead.
But Norris's progress ended there. Despite much fresher tyres, Tsunoda could do little about Lawson up ahead, the Racing Bulls car performing well on the long straight, and Norris himself couldn't overcome the DRS Tsunoda was getting from Lawson.
He tried to go around the outside of Tsunoda into Turn 1 on the final lap, but wasn't particularly close to pulling it off.
It was a disappointing race for Ferrari, with Lewis Hamilton struggling on hards early on - at one point very nearly hitting the barrier - but being waved ahead of a fading Leclerc late on thanks to a tyre compound advantage, only to come up on the Lawson-Tsunoda-Norris group and get stuck.
Isack Hadjar picked up the final point for Racing Bulls, his race hindered by an apparent error early on that dropped him behind a couple of cars. However, he was a remarkable 28.6s clear of 11th place in the final classification.
Piastri was the race's only retirement, though there was another incident of note, as Sainz's Williams team-mate Alex Albon punted Alpine's Franco Colapinto into a Turn 5 spit right after Colapinto had come out of the pits, Albon earning a 10-second penalty that dropped him from 11th to 13th at the flag.
Results
1 Max Verstappen (Red Bull)
2 George Russell (Mercedes)
3 Carlos Sainz (Williams)
4 Kimi Antonelli (Mercedes)
5 Liam Lawson (Racing Bulls)
6 Yuki Tsunoda (Red Bull)
7 Lando Norris (McLaren)
8 Lewis Hamilton (Ferrari)
9 Charles Leclerc (Ferrari)
10 Isack Hadjar (Racing Bulls)
11 Alex Albon (Williams)
12 Gabriel Bortoleto (Sauber)
13 Ollie Bearman (Haas)
14 Esteban Ocon (Haas)
15 Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin)
16 Nico Hulkenberg (Sauber)
17 Lance Stroll (Aston Martin)
18 Pierre Gasly (Alpine)
19 Franco Colapinto (Alpine)
DNF Oscar Piastri (McLaren)
