McLaren now leads the Formula 1 constructors’ championship in 2024, after Oscar Piastri won and Lando Norris finished fourth in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. In addition, Sergio Perez clashed with Carlos Sainz and Max Verstappen had a bad weekend.

Now that McLaren has stated that Piastri will support Norris when needed and Red Bull has introduced an upgrade that should fix the team’s major issues, what do the events in Baku mean for the title fight?

Here are our team’s immediate thoughts:

VERSTAPPEN GETS AWAY WITH IT AGAIN

Ben Anderson

This was yet another example of how Verstappen got away with it in the ‘battle’ for the drivers’ championship. He was definitely there for the taking this weekend, but the ‘wrong’ McLaren won, so Verstappen hardly suffered any damage.

And this time the fault was certainly not McLaren’s, who produced arguably the most impressive Grand Prix of the season so far, given the team’s pace on Friday which appeared to have left them behind Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes.

Piastri was superior and took exquisite revenge on Charles Leclerc before Monza. Norris also drove a brilliant race – also playing a crucial role in Piastri’s victory by slowing down Perez and helping Piastri avoid the dreaded ‘undercut’ at the pit stops.

McLaren now lead the Constructors’ Championship by 20 points, a fully deserved reward for the team’s incredible development curve – and for having two top drivers available to benefit from that progress.

While Red Bull will be somewhat encouraged by the fact that Perez was involved with the team up until the crash with Sainz, it must also be very concerned that this latest floor improvement appears to only benefit the slower driver.

Verstappen agrees that the car is generally better than it was, but his RB20 was jumping in the back, not turning in and not braking properly. Perhaps it was an anomaly for Baku, but that’s two races in a row, he’s still nowhere near a podium and his winless streak now stretches to seven races…

What happened to Norris in Q1 was just bad luck. But given the way the race ultimately went for McLaren and Piastri, this has to be seen as a missed opportunity for Norris to really put Verstappen under pressure.

A BIG INTRA-TEAM TWIST FOR RED BULL

Scott Mitchell-Malm

I remain sceptical about the idea of ​​a championship battle between the drivers, but this doesn’t really change anything.

But the vague hope of that remained alive after Norris managed to gain a small lead over Verstappen despite his nightmare on Saturday.

What this has done is put a new spin on the Red Bull problem: namely that there is potential in that car that Verstappen is not able to exploit. Sergio Perez showed that this weekend, and it has been a very long time since that was the case.

Normally we think Verstappen gets the most out of the car and that can be positive for him. If he learns from this, as he did from his defeat to Perez in Baku in 2023, he will clearly fight for podiums at his worst for the rest of the season. That will be enough to take the championship.

Perez’s form is a welcome bright spot for Red Bull, but not enough given that the car is weaker than McLaren. So I’d be surprised if Red Bull got back into the Constructors’ Championship. That fight was only going one way and now that McLaren are out front I see no reason why it wouldn’t stay there.

McLAREN TEAM ORDERS STATEMENT SEEMS STUPID NOW

Josh Suttill

Sunday couldn’t have gone better for McLaren.

Piastri wins from the front row, and Norris storms from 15th to fourth with a pass on title rival Verstappen. It’s a big win for the team and shows that Norris can still make progress in the championship, even after an extraordinary qualifying disaster. You’d much rather have the car that retired in qualifying due to unfortunate circumstances than the one that suffered on Sunday due to factors of its own making.

But McLaren did make a mistake when it made headlines just before the weekend when it said it favoured Norris over Piastri when it didn’t need to.

Backing Norris and making tough decisions to win the drivers’ title was the right thing to do. It’s a realistic goal and there are things McLaren can and should do.

But there was no need to set the tone and narrative of the weekend with such a grand public statement on Thursday.

Norris said Thursday ““We’ve made decisions and worked through things before, we just haven’t said it publicly. We’ve told you more what you ultimately want to hear than anything else,” indicating that one of the key motivators of McLaren’s Norris priority communications was to silence the noise from fans and media.

But if it was all about the optics, it appears that Piastri’s victory, which was well behind the McLaren driver, was an unnecessary own goal.

It was not foreseeable that Norris would qualify so out of position, but Piastri has outpaced Norris in the last six laps before Baku, so it was possible that it could happen again this weekend.

Not only is that with the knowledge we have now, McLaren could have handled matters better internally and openly stated that it wants to win both titles and promised that it would do whatever it took to win them.

NORRIS NOT GAINS GROUND FAST ENOUGH

Edd Stro

What happened in Baku did not change the fight for the World Cup.

Although McLaren now lead the Constructors’ Championship, this has been inevitable for some time and is simply the realisation of a prevailing trend.

In the Drivers’ Championship, this is another race that could have been huge for Norris but ultimately wasn’t. That’s due to the misfortune of running into a double yellow flag on Esteban Ocon’s crawling Alpine in Q1, meaning it was always going to be a race of damage limitation.

Overall, things were going well for Norris, as he beat Verstappen. But the collision between Carlos Sainz and Perez also helped, as it denied Verstappen the chance to set an inevitable fastest lap, as he had gone on soft tyres. That meant Norris held on, giving him a three-point lead.

But while that was a good outcome for Norris in the context of Sunday, in the bigger picture it’s still well below the closing percentage he should be achieving.

His gains are slow, and 59 points with seven races (and three sprints) to go is still not enough. This weekend, that is down to bad qualifying luck, but Formula 1 history is full of examples of how hard it is to make big, sustained points gains when you are lagging behind even with a stronger car.

The key questions remain: can Red Bull make a big move – likely next month in Austin – with a corrective upgrade and can Norris accelerate the pace of his glacial points progress as time goes on?

PLEASE LET US KEEP THIS GREAT RACING GOING

Gary Anderson

I think we just saw the best racing in a few seasons with three different teams battling it out for the win. Unfortunately the FIA ​​is about to do a reset with major regulation changes for 2026. Get rid of the MGU-H if you want, help save the world by using a higher percentage of sustainable fuel, but please at least rethink the chassis changes, just dot the i’s and cross the t’s on the current package and let’s keep what we have: racing.

To reiterate what we have now, it’s a battle royale for the big payout of the Constructors’ Championship at the end of the season. It’s more exciting than it probably was 10 years ago, with McLaren now leading with 476 points, Red Bull on 456, Ferrari still close behind on 425, so it’s all up for grabs in the remaining seven events.

In terms of the drivers’ championship, Norris is finding it a little harder to catch Verstappen. He closed the gap a little this weekend, but not enough to make a big impact.

Verstappen has 313 points, Norris 254, Leclerc 235 and today’s winner Piastri is on 222, so in reality none of the top four are out. Piastri is the biggest points winner in the last seven races, so not bad for – as his manager Mark Webber would call it – a “number two”. I’m just kidding.

With seven Grands Prix to go (with the fastest lap worth 182 GP points, plus three sprints worth 24 points, for a total of 206 points up for grabs), Norris needs an average of nine more points per race than Verstappen, Leclerc 11 and Piastri 13. Tough for everyone except Norris, but not impossible.

For Red Bull, it’s been about 10 races since this happened, but the team hasn’t really reacted to it the way they would have in the past.

But if Verstappen doesn’t waste points by driving too fast and making mistakes, the drivers’ championship is probably still his.

It’s a different story for the constructors and hopefully both championships will continue until the last race of the season.