Formula 1 arrives in Baku this week for a Grand Prix unlike any of the nine held there before: for the first time since the race joined the calendar in 2017, the Azerbaijan Grand Prix will be run on a Saturday. The 51-lap race around the 6.003km Baku City Circuit starts at 15:00 local time on 26 September — 12:00 BST — with BBC Radio 5 Live commentary and live text coverage on the BBC Sport website and app.
Kimi Antonelli comes to Azerbaijan with 292 points and an 81-point cushion over Mercedes team-mate George Russell, having won at Monza and then at the Madring on the Spanish Grand Prix’s Madrid debut. It is his eighth victory of a season in which the sport’s new regulations have reshaped the order entirely.
Why the weekend has moved forward a day
The schedule shift came at the request of the Azerbaijani government. September 27 is Remembrance Day, a national day of mourning for military personnel killed in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, so the entire race weekend has been pulled forward 24 hours. Practice runs on Thursday, qualifying on Friday, and the race on Saturday.
That compresses the rhythm teams have built their weekends around. Engineers lose the usual overnight gap between final practice and qualifying in the shape they are used to, and on a street circuit where track evolution between sessions is among the most dramatic of the year, the teams that read the surface quickest on Thursday will carry the advantage into Friday afternoon.
The full BBC schedule
All times BST. Commentary is available on BBC Radio 5 Live and 5 Sports Extra, on BBC Sounds, via smart speaker (“play 5 Live”), and through live text commentary on the BBC Sport website and app.
- Thursday 24 September: First practice, 09:30-10:30
- Thursday 24 September: Second practice, 13:00-14:00
- Friday 25 September: Third practice, 09:30-10:30
- Friday 25 September: Qualifying, 13:00-14:00
- Saturday 26 September: Race, 12:00 (build-up from 11:00)
The Chequered Flag podcast follows the race with reaction and analysis, available on BBC Sounds and now also on BBC iPlayer and YouTube. Highlights, reports and driver reaction appear on the BBC Sport website and app throughout the weekend.
What Baku will decide
The Baku City Circuit has always been a freak of the calendar: the narrow, walled climb past the old city at turns eight to 12, where cars pass with barely a metre of margin, feeding into a run to the start-finish line of more than two kilometres — one of the longest flat-out stretches in Formula 1. Under the 2026 power unit rules, with a far greater share of the car’s output coming from electrical energy, that straight becomes a strategic problem rather than simply a top-speed contest. Teams must decide where to harvest and where to deploy, and a car that arrives at the final corner with nothing left in the battery is a sitting target.
Mercedes have had the benchmark energy recovery system all season, which is the single biggest reason Antonelli and Russell occupy the top two places and why the team sits on 503 points to Ferrari’s 358. Baku should reward that advantage more than most circuits. But the Madrid result flattered them: Lando Norris looked to have the quickest McLaren before a virtual safety car for Lance Stroll’s stopped Aston Martin on lap 15 handed the pit window to Antonelli and Max Verstappen.
Verstappen won here in 2025 and has taken five podiums in his last seven races, including third at Monza and second in Madrid. That recent form has not rescued his championship — he is sixth on 145 points, behind Lewis Hamilton (191), Norris (186) and Charles Leclerc (167) — but Baku has historically suited Red Bull’s low-drag approach, and it is the kind of circuit where a safety car can rewrite a race in a single lap. Eight of the nine previous Azerbaijan Grands Prix have featured one.
With nine rounds remaining, the title will not be settled in Baku. What it can do is confirm whether Mercedes’ regulation-era advantage holds on a track that tests it differently — or whether Norris and McLaren, denied in Madrid, finally convert pace into points.
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Note: the supplied summary said “Spanish Grand Prix” — that’s an error in the source brief (the Spanish GP at Madrid was 11-13 September, round 14). The 24-26 September race is the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in Baku, as the headline states, so I wrote it as Azerbaijan. Word count: ~700.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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