George Russell delivered the perfect weekend in Baku. Pole position, a lights-to-flag victory, and not a single mistake along the way. The George Russell Baku win has done more than add 25 points to his tally. It has changed the conversation inside Mercedes about who really holds the upper hand between him and Kimi Antonelli.
Antonelli’s weekend could hardly have gone worse. He crashed in qualifying, was demoted to sixteenth on the grid, and had to fight back through the field just to salvage fifth. That recovery still brought 10 points, which says something about his class. But it was Russell who set the pace all weekend at the Baku City Circuit, as our earlier report on the race made clear. Pole, the race lead and the podium celebrations belonged to one Mercedes driver alone, and it wasn’t the one who has dominated most of this season.
Russell Dominates Baku as Antonelli Formula Shifts
For most of this year, Antonelli has been the Mercedes driver setting the terms. He arrives at circuits and simply goes quicker over a race distance, even on weekends when Russell looks sharper in practice or claims a better grid slot. Baku broke that pattern completely.
Russell was faster in every session that mattered. He took pole, controlled the start, and was never seriously threatened for the lead. Antonelli, starting from the back after his qualifying crash, drove a determined race to reach fifth, but he was never a factor at the front. The result is slashing Antonelli’s lead in the drivers’ championship, even if the gap remains significant. It’s the kind of scoreline that gets pundits talking, and F1 TV’s James Hinchcliffe was among the first to say what a lot of Mercedes watchers were already thinking.
Analyzing Race Pace and the Baku Performance Gap
Hinchcliffe’s interest wasn’t really about the pole lap or the start. It was about race pace, the metric that has quietly favoured Antonelli all season, even on days when Russell has come out on top.
Speaking on the F1 Nation podcast, Hinchcliffe explained why Baku stood out to him. “What’s interesting for me is even at other tracks when George has been able to pull out good laps in practice, a good qualifying effort, in the race Kimi’s always still had the edge, even when George has won,” he said.
He pointed to specific examples from earlier in the season to back up the point. “You think back to when he passed him in Barcelona before Kimi’s car expired. He was closing down on everybody in Austria. Today they didn’t have that. Kimi did not have the pace of George. Kimi didn’t have the pace of George all weekend long,” Hinchcliffe said. That is a notable shift from a pundit who has watched Antonelli’s race craft close the gap on Russell time and again this year.
Hinchcliffe Dissects Mercedes Telemetry and Form
Hinchcliffe was careful not to dismiss Antonelli’s Baku weekend as simply a bad one. He acknowledged the rookie lost valuable track time after his qualifying crash, yet still argued the gap ran deeper than lost practice laps.
“Fine, he missed some laps in first practice, but he had FP2. He had FP3. He’s a professional. He gets up to speed quickly,” Hinchcliffe said. “What I’m really curious about is, has George cracked the code a little bit? Has he found something? Has he figured out how to get that extra step of performance out of this car? Because at no point this weekend was Kimi anywhere close to his level.”
That question, whether Russell has cracked the code on extracting more from the Mercedes over a race stint, is exactly what makes the Baku result worth watching beyond the raw points. Hinchcliffe stopped short of claiming Mercedes had made any specific technical change, and there is no evidence of an upgrade behind Russell’s pace. His theory is about the driver finding something within the car he already has, not a car that has changed under him. You can find his full remarks in Hinchcliffe’s comments to Motorsport.com.
Title Implications Heading into Singapore and Malaysia
None of this changes the championship table today. Antonelli still leads Russell by 66 points after Baku, a gap the George Russell Baku win narrowed but didn’t come close to closing. Fans reacting to the result, including plenty in our own comments on the reaction to his Baku win, are right to temper their excitement with that context.
Even Hinchcliffe was cautious about reading too much into a single race. “And I’m not saying that he has, but I’m curious if we get to Malaysia, if we get to Singapore, if we start seeing him closer, especially in race pace, maybe he has finally started to put all the pieces together,” he said.
That is the fair way to frame it. One dominant weekend doesn’t confirm a permanent shift in the dynamic between the two Mercedes drivers. Singapore and Malaysia will tell us far more about whether Russell has genuinely found extra race pace or whether Baku was simply a circuit that suited him on a weekend Antonelli lost to a crash. Until then, the code Hinchcliffe describes remains a theory worth testing rather than a fact worth banking on.
