Formula 1 raced on a Saturday in Baku, the first of this season’s two Saturday races along with Las Vegas, and the win went to the driver who has been called Mr. Saturday since his Williams days. George Russell won the Azerbaijan Grand Prix by 0.196 seconds from Max Verstappen, a day after taking pole by 0.837 seconds. It is the eighth win of his career and his third of 2026.

He had topped both practice sessions on Thursday, and the race began the way the rest of his weekend had gone. Russell kept the lead into Turn 1 and spent the first half of the afternoon building a gap, which is about as much control as anyone gets in Baku. The lap runs through the tight right angles of the new town, squeezes between the walls of the Old City at the castle, then opens into a flat-out run of more than two kilometres back to the line. It has a long record of bringing out the Safety Car, and Russell knew it. “Around a circuit like Baku that’s always a possibility,” he said afterwards.

The first came on lap 31, when Alex Albon’s Williams went into the barrier. Russell was more than 10 seconds clear at that point, and almost the whole field used the Safety Car to make its only pit stop, Russell included, which handed the cars behind their gap back for free. Restarts are the hardest part of the race to lead here. Tyres and brakes cool while the field circulates behind the Safety Car, the car in second gets a tow along that long straight, and the leader has to choose the moment to go without handing the driver behind a run into the braking zone. Russell had to get it right more than once, and the last time Verstappen was the car sitting in his mirrors.

The final stint was two drivers pushing as hard as a street circuit allows, with walls on both sides and no run-off to save a mistake. Russell didn’t make one. Bradley Lord, the Mercedes deputy team principal, called it a race that was “completely error free, even with Verstappen breathing down his neck,” and added that around Baku, that’s easier said than done.

It very nearly went wrong on the last lap. Valtteri Bottas hit the wall, yellow flags came out, and Russell lifted as the rules require. When he went back to the throttle, the power didn’t come with him. “I had no turbo, so I had no power,” he said. “And Max almost got me at the line.” The gap when they crossed it was 0.196 seconds.

Put together, the weekend was the first grand slam of Russell’s Formula 1 career: pole position, the win, the fastest lap of the race and every one of the 51 laps in the lead. It is the rarest clean sweep a driver can make at a single Grand Prix, because it asks for the quickest car over one lap and over a full race distance, and for nothing to go wrong in between. Two Safety Cars, two restarts with a Red Bull in the mirrors and a car that lost its turbo on the final lap did their best to take it away.

There is something fitting about who did it, and when. Russell earned the Mr. Saturday name at Williams, where he kept putting a slow car into places it had no business being on qualifying day, and it followed him to Mercedes as a compliment that always carried a small question about what happened on Sundays. Baku answered it in the strangest way possible. The race moved to Saturday this year, so Russell’s pole came on a Friday. Then Saturday arrived, and Mr. Saturday led all of it.

It had been a long wait. Antonelli leads the championship, the new cars have not always suited the way Russell drives, and his last win had come in Austria in June. He said afterwards that he never lost faith in himself through that stretch. “It wasn’t like I just suddenly forgot how to drive, and I knew I would be able to find it again,” he said. “I just had to be patient.” He called Baku “probably my first grand slam in Formula 1 and, for sure, the most dominant weekend I’ve had.”

Red Bull left Baku with both cars on the podium. Verstappen started eighth after a difficult qualifying, worked through the field in the first stint and got past Oscar Piastri at the lap 36 restart to take up the chase of Russell. Isack Hadjar finished third on his return from injury, 10.704 seconds behind the winner. Charles Leclerc was fourth for Ferrari.

Kimi Antonelli had a very different few days. A hydraulic problem cost him running on Thursday, and on Friday he hit the inside wall at Turn 1 in Q1 and went no further, which left him 16th on the grid. He called Saturday damage limitation. He sat patiently in the overtaking trains, took the openings when the Safety Car periods bunched the field up, and combined an alternative strategy with some decisive overtakes. He finished fifth, 0.376 seconds behind Leclerc.

Lord said the team’s worry had been that Antonelli would treat it as “Monza Part Two” and try to force it. Andrew Shovlin, the team’s trackside engineering director, said Antonelli had stayed focused after Friday’s disappointment and made several decisive overtakes, and that the recovery showed both the pace of the car and his determination.

Lewis Hamilton was sixth. Arvid Lindblad took seventh for Racing Bulls, three hundredths of a second ahead of Esteban Ocon, and Oliver Bearman made it two Haas cars in the points in ninth. Carlos Sainz started 14th after a five-place penalty for a yellow flag infringement in qualifying and finished tenth, scoring for Williams. Nico Hülkenberg missed the last point by 0.815 seconds.

Six cars did not finish, both Alpines and both Aston Martins among them. Baku opens a triple-header, and the next stop is the Sepang International Circuit, which hosts the Bahrain Grand Prix this year, before the lights of Singapore. Lord said Malaysia is a special weekend for Mercedes because of the title partnership with PETRONAS, and both of its cars will arrive there having scored in Baku.

Norris doesn’t expect the next few weekends to be easy for McLaren either. “Maybe Malaysia is a better one for us,” he said.