Azerbaijan Grand Prix: Can Anyone Stop Kimi Antonelli?

• Round15 of 23
• Race daySat 26 Sep
• CircuitBaku
• Still to run9 rounds

Three wins in the last five rounds, and two of them back to back. Kimi Antonelli goes to Baku on 292 points, 81 clear of George Russell in the same Mercedes, having won at Monza and Madrid and taken second in Zandvoort. The spring lead he built has not shrunk over the summer. It has doubled.

Championship standings

Eighty-one points split the top two, both of them silver. Lewis Hamilton is third for Ferrari, another 20 back from Russell and 101 off the lead. Toggle between drivers and constructors for the full picture heading into Azerbaijan:

Lando Norris sits fourth on 186, five behind Hamilton, and Charles Leclerc fifth on 167. Max Verstappen, six-time winner in Baku's recent history as a driver, is sixth on 145. With nine rounds left there is plenty on the table for the chasers, but every one of them has to get past Russell first, and Russell has to get past Antonelli.

Switch to the constructors and Mercedes lead 503 to Ferrari's 358, a 145-point cushion built on two cars in the top two of the drivers' table. McLaren are third on 304 with Norris carrying most of it, Piastri seventh in the drivers' standings on 118. Red Bull are fourth on 227.

Recent form

113 points in five rounds. That's Antonelli's haul over the Spa-to-Madrid stretch, 24 more than anyone else managed. Here is where the leading contenders finished in each of the last five races, best recent form first:

Read the rows left to right. Antonelli's is the cleanest on the grid: 1, 3, 2, 1, 1, no finish worse than third. Norris is next on 89 with wins in Hungary and the Netherlands, then a fourth and a third. Verstappen's 69 comes despite a retirement at Zandvoort, and Leclerc's 59 despite one in Italy. Hamilton is the awkward row here, fourth place in the championship form table on 44 points and a retirement in Madrid to end the window.

How the title race has unfolded

The cumulative view shows a lead that keeps compounding rather than one bought early and defended. Switch to the momentum view for the scoring rate instead of the total:

Antonelli is at 24.3 points a race over the last three rounds. Norris is at 19.3, Russell at 17, Hamilton at 7.3. Nobody is closing at that rate. Russell would need to find seven points a race on his teammate just to hold station in the gap, never mind cut it.

If current form holds

495 points. Take each driver's scoring rate over the last five races and run it across the nine rounds still to come and that's where Antonelli ends up. Nobody keeps a streak clean to Abu Dhabi, so read it as a what-if rather than a forecast:

The projection puts Norris second on 346, 149 behind, with Russell third on 314. Leclerc, Hamilton and Verstappen bunch between 269 and 273, which is the more interesting fight on this maths: three drivers separated by four points over nine races. At the front, current form doesn't produce a title race. It produces a procession.

What's at stake this weekend

81 points, nine rounds, and one Saturday in Baku. The gap is too big for a single weekend to touch:

The long game is the only game. Russell needs to average nine points a race more than Antonelli across the remaining nine rounds to arrive in Abu Dhabi level. He's currently scoring 7.3 fewer per race than his teammate. That's the size of the swing required, and it has to start somewhere.

Across the rest of the season, each challenger has a target to hit:

• Russell: average +9 pts a race on Antonelli to erase the 81-point gap by Abu Dhabi.
• Hamilton: about +2.5 a race on Russell to take second.
• Norris: under a point a race on Hamilton flips third, and he's out-scoring him by 9 over the last five.
• Ferrari: roughly +16 a race on Mercedes to close the 145-point constructors' gap.

The battles across the grid

The title is the widest gap on the board. Almost everything else is closer. Here they are, sorted by the margin:

A single point splits Nico Hülkenberg and Carlos Sainz for 15th, and four separate Alpine and RB in the fight for fifth in the constructors'. Five points cover Hamilton and Norris for best of the rest, and seven cover Lawson and Gasly for ninth. The closest fight that touches the podium is for second, where 20 points split Russell and Hamilton, and Hamilton's retirement in Madrid is most of the reason it isn't closer.

The circuit: Baku

• Lap length6.003 km
• Corners20
• Race laps51

Baku is a street circuit of two halves. The old-town section climbs and narrows through a series of right-angle turns with walls on both sides, where a car has to be planted and a driver has to be precise. Then comes the run past the castle walls and onto a start-finish straight over two kilometres long, the sort of stretch that rewards low drag and punishes anyone who set the car up for the twisty part. Teams cannot have both, and the compromise they pick usually decides their weekend.

Two ways to read what that favours: how the season's other power-sensitive tracks have gone, and who tends to win here.

The Baku history belongs to Red Bull. Verstappen won here in 2025 and 2022, Pérez in 2023 and 2021, with Piastri's 2024 McLaren win the only break in the sequence and Bottas's 2019 Mercedes the oldest result on the list. That's four Red Bull wins in the last six runnings. Whether it means much in 2026 is another question: Verstappen is sixth in the championship, Red Bull fourth in the constructors', and Pérez is at Cadillac on zero points.

The walls decide this one. Baku has no run-off in the castle section, so a small error ends a race rather than costing a tenth. Safety cars come often, and they have flipped strategies here before.

Watch the long straight. Over two kilometres flat out into a heavy braking zone at Turn 1, plus the Manual Override boost a chasing car can deploy, makes this one of the best overtaking spots of the year. Qualifying matters less here than the lap times suggest.

For the full podium history, pole-to-win conversion and every past result here, see our Azerbaijan Grand Prix results page.