What's gone wrong for Piastri in 2026?
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What makes Baku a unique challenge for the 2026 season?
The athletic.
The race is on. And as F1 heads to Baku, scene of his second Grand Prix win in 2024 and the start of his championship tilt, starting to unwind in 25, we ask what's happened to Oscar Piastri this year. And we tackle a long-awaited Williams upgrade and ask if it can improve the car enough to end a point drought that stretches back to Monaco in early June. I'm Ed Straw, and joining me to Tell All are Samath Canal and Ben Anderson. Yeah. Welcome to the Race F1 podcast brought to you by Atlassian. We're going to be looking ahead to the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, which of course is a tricky one because it is a Saturday race. So it's Thursday, Friday, Saturday. So make sure you don't get caught out by uh unexpected sessions starting a day earlier.
Now, Samarth, Azerbaijan, you're not going to be on the ground this year, but it's an old favourite of yours, isn't it, Baku?
Favourite is a uh that's difficult. Uh it's not a favourite, but I've I've had some memories. Yeah, favourite strong word. I remember leaving my phone in a taxi there last time I was there, uh and it took the whole day to get it back. Uh that was fun. And um it's just such a unique place though. Uh it's it's such an interesting place to walk around. I mean it i i if you kind of you feel so open there, you've kind of got the Caspian Sea kind of breeze coming in, and then to get from one side of the circuit to another you have to kind of take like subway tunnels to get underneath uh and then you've got looming skyscrapers at the end of it. It's quite like i yeah, it's a really fun place to visit, but I've I've got some memories there.
I don't know if it's my favourite.
The frustrating thing, of course, Ben, is that all of the flights into Baku and out of Baku seem to leave at very inconvenient times. That's uh that's my main complaint about what is otherwise a very nice race.
Well, it's uh it's changed quite a lot. I think they there used to be lots of British Airways flights in tobacco because of uh the oil industry, and then they dried up and uh we had to start taking charter planes to Baku, even from the second year of the race. I I covered the first two, the first of which was the European Grand Prix, it wasn't the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, and we had a difficult weekend because my then colleague Ian Parks his father unp unfortunately. Passed away during the race weekend and he had to be flown home by Mercedes to deal with that. So we were we were underpowered and then we were treated to a pretty terrible race. After F2 chaos, everyone got so excited that F1 was going to be amazingly chaotic and it wasn't.
And then 2017. Uh Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel made up for it by banging wheels under a safety car and it all kicking off during their uh title battle. So I was there for that. Um and it's been pretty fun, I think, since. Um it's one of those races that's kind of grown into itself on the calendar, quite an interesting challenge between really slow first and middle sectors and then speeding up and then obviously the the long flat out blast in the final sector, so a difficult track to set your car up for and with close walls and quite high speeds, uh a good recipe for some incident as well.
Yeah, it's a proper street circuit, isn't it, in that it is in the city and with some pretty spectacular sights within that. So unlike say Madrid, which I like to call a an urban circuit, this one is a proper street track and it's a car park circuit. Yeah, exactly. So it really does have that sense of being the place, you know, if you you're walking to the track, you're kind of squeezed between the the the edge of the track and the fronts of buildings and that kind of thing. So it's uh yeah, very much a uh proper, distinct event. And I think it's probably one of the more popular races on the calendar for fans now. So certainly a track that over the past decade or so since F1 first went there in twenty sixteen that's created plenty of stories and independent.
Indeed. Some of those stories have been about Oscar Piastri, haven't they?
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What makes Baku a unique challenge for the 2026 season?
0:02–20:24
2
Why is Oscar Piastri struggling in the 2026 cars?
20:24–28:36
3
Can Piastri overcome his early‑sector grip issues at Baku?
28:36–36:02
4
Is McLaren’s car now favouring Lando Norris over Piastri?
36:02–42:53
5
Will the long‑awaited Williams upgrade finally end their points drought?
42:53–47:38
Speakers
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