There’s usually a lot of chaos at Baku which shakes things up, so many people tend to forget that incident-free races here tend to be pretty boring. Despite the huge straight you need a massive pace delta to overtake, and while it’s possible to overtake at a couple of spots in sector 1 it’s far from easy.

With the tyre situation as it is I can’t help but think Pirelli maybe should have gambled on C3-C5-C6 in the hopes of forcing a two-stopper. As it is we had pretty much no deg, the undercut was not particularly powerful and the strategy was fairly uninteresting. We had some early stop gambles in Alonso and Leclerc but neither seemed to have gained much from it. Though Alonso did have a penalty to take at his stop for being tricked into false starting himself because of Piastri.

Biggest winner today (apart from Sainz of course) was Merc I think, who once again looked great in the cold temps. Fantastic drive from Mr. Consistency as usual but Antonelli actually looked really good today. One of the few drivers who posted multiple on-track overtakes and had good pace throughout, very promising signs after a rough season.

Shambles of a weekend for McLaren as everything went wrong everywhere - crashes, a slow stop and poor pace on top of a false start for Piastri and Lando sleeping on the SC restart. And all that when it seems Red Bull have finally caught a second wind. Max will always be Max, but take one look at Yuki today and you’ll realise something has happened to the car. With two huge margin wins back-to-back for Max I think the WDC fight is very much on.

Can’t fault anyone for voting for Sainz as DOTD but my vote has to go to Lawson. I’m not a fan of the guy and I think he’s been more underwhelming than not, but he was good this weekend and displayed great defensive driving to keep faster cars behind the whole race. It must suck for him to feel like he missed out on a podium, but realistically he extracted all there was in this race with a very good drive.