Perez wins, a comfortable 1-2 for Red Bull at the Azerbaijan GP

Red Bull was expected to dominate the Baku circuit and the predictions were confirmed. Sergio Perez was the first to see the checkered flag, Max Verstappen completed a 1:2.

At the start we didn’t have an incident between the leaders, with Leclerc leading, followed by Verstappen, Perez, Sainz, Hamilton and Alonso.

Further back we had contact between Piastri and Albon. Verstappen seemed to take a wait-and-see attitude until the DRS activated. After that, the Dutchman attacked Leclerc and comfortably passed him on the fourth lap.

Two laps later, Perez did the same as both Red Bulls took over the race. Further back we had a rollercoaster ride between Saints, Hamilton and Alonso, all 1.5 seconds apart.

On lap 10, Verstappen had to pit for a tire change after complaining about severe skidding. The Dutchman was unlucky Immediately after De Vries retired we had a safety car, so everyone went to change tires.

Thus, Perez took the lead with Leclerc second and Verstappen third. The Dutchman overtook Monegasque at the restart. This restored Red Bulls 1-2, but with the order of the drivers reversed.

The fight for victory was decided by the first pit stop and Red Bull’s unwise decision to bring Verstappen into the pits for a tire change, despite Nick de Vries’ Alpha Tauri having already stalled on track, with a fractured front left Suspension after the Dutchman hit the wall.

The marshals soon decided to deploy the safety car, just as Verstappen entered the pits. On the contrary, Hamilton and Mercedes, who had made their first pit stop a little earlier to defend their position with the undercut in front of Alonso, were simply unlucky as De Vries’ accident hadn’t happened yet.

After that, Pérez, Leclerc and Alonso, who came to change tires under the safety car, came out on top as winners. The top two returned to the track in their respective race positions, ahead of Verstappen, who lost the lead to a wrong decision by Red Bull.

With Red Bull’s top speed advantage down the straight, Leclerc was an easy target for Verstappen even with DRS turned off, so the Dutchman attacked ahead of Turn 3 and moved into second place. In the meantime, however, Perez had managed to get out of Verstappen’s DRS zone to defend his lead.

Despite Verstappen pushing furiously afterwards, Perez reacted perfectly and managed to increase the gap to around 3.5 inches, helped by some grip issues in the Dutchman’s RB19 due to an imbalance in the diff-brake setup.

In the last 10 rounds, RBR managed to solve the problem, but Perez remained unerring and never jeopardized his victory. The gap rose to 3.6 inches and never fell much below that until the checkered flag, Perez’s second of the year.

Charles Leclerc’s performance was also excellent, in Ferrari’s first encouraging result (and podium) of the year: the Monegasque managed his tires well to ward off the threat of Fernando Alonso behind him.

The Spaniard had earlier made a brilliant move to pass Carlos Sainz and relied on the Aston Martin AMR23’s better tire management to claim his fourth consecutive podium finish of the year. But Ferrari showed improvement in this area as well, and Leclerc was on target.

Hamilton moved up to 6th after his first pit stop mishap and took advantage of a mistake by Lance Stroll to overtake the Canadian, while George Russell dropped to 8th after being passed by Hamilton as the young Brit conceded that he didn’t do well at the restart after the safety car.

After the Azerbaijan GP ended with the first sprint of the year, Formula 1 now moves on to next week (5-7 May) with the 5th round of the season in Miami, USA.