Baku practice: Mercedes fastest, but reliability is the real story

The No. 12 Mercedes of Kimi Antonelli was pushed backwards into the garage twenty minutes into the first practice session. No engine noise, no turbo whine, only the sound of tyres rolling across concrete and the sigh of two mechanics behind the rear wing. A hydraulic system had given up, and a Virtual Safety Car was deployed through the middle sector of the Baku City Circuit. A few dozen metres away, inside the Williams garage, the smell of burnt brake fluid still hung in the air after Carlos Sainz brought his upgraded car back with flames licking from the rear.

I stood in the technical area with my notebook open and my pen long since set down. If you strip away every timing column, was what we had just watched really a contest of speed?

That question followed me through Friday. And when I pieced the data back together, I realised the answer was not in the fastest car. It was in the cars that could not complete the session.

Baku City Circuit runs just over six kilometres. It is a street track, but nothing like Monaco. The seaside straight lets cars touch 340 km/h, and seconds later the steering wheel has to wrestle the narrowest uphill corner in the sport's history. Track temperatures reached thirty degrees Celsius at midday, and with every passing lap the rubber laid down grew thicker, pulling lap times down with it. That is why any hasty comparison between an early runner and a late runner in Baku has to be placed in brackets.

Friday carried another layer this year. Williams brought its heaviest upgrade package since the start of the season, while Audi tested a series of new aerodynamic parts. For midfield teams, two practice sessions are not a race for lap time but a compatibility test between new components and an old car. The result was clear enough: Sainz paid for it with a rear-brake fire, while the two Audis quietly lined up around fourteenth and fifteenth.

The second session, once temperatures eased and the surface had properly matured, was when teams finally opened up. George Russell put his Mercedes on 1:43.347, and Antonelli — who had lost half his morning to the hydraulic failure — followed on 1:43.899. A one-two for the reigning champions, even though the No. 12 car had completed barely twenty laps all day.

Max Verstappen sat behind on 1:44.492, but that number was set on the Medium compound. Placed side by side under equal conditions, the margin recorded was around four tenths — enough to call an advantage, not enough to call a gulf. The two Ferraris of Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton sat close to a second adrift, a worrying figure for a team that lives on single-lap pace.

Then came McLaren, the team that left the most questions behind. Lando Norris finished only fourteenth in the opening session, while Oscar Piastri lost almost the entire run to an unusual vibration from the floor. When the car went up on the jacks, the floor was found damaged and was secured with plastic zip ties — not something anyone wants to see on a car fighting for a championship. Those zip ties said a great deal about a reactive afternoon.

But read only the timing sheet and you miss most of the story. Across more than three hours of running, at least six mechanical incidents were recorded up and down the lane: Antonelli's hydraulics, Sainz's brake fire, Isack Hadjar's engine — the driver back after three races out with a wrist injury and immediately limited on mileage — Oliver Bearman's engine stop, a suspected oil leak on Fernando Alonso's Aston Martin, and a heavy crash from Arvid Lindblad that brought out the red flag with severe damage to the rear of the car.

Verstappen also described his car over the radio in terms that were not particularly flattering. Hardly surprising. On a circuit that demands hard braking, instant acceleration and constant cooling, fragility always reveals itself earlier than speed.

And this is where I want to pause longest: after two sessions in Baku, the most frightening thing is not the fastest car. It is the list of cars that had to stay in the garage.

Elsewhere that evening, headlines uniformly described Mercedes as holding a large advantage over the rest. I understand the impulse — a one-two is always good material. But four tenths in a second practice session is not yet a decisive line, especially when that session was chopped into pieces by virtual safety cars and a red flag. Anyone who watches closely knows that lap time in Baku depends on whether you go out at minute twenty or minute forty, whether you meet traffic, and whether you have to run again after burning a set of tyres in the garage.

One small detail stayed with me. This Friday report, when pushed through an automated classification system, was tagged as football. It was only an algorithm's error. But it reminded me that people read events through ready-made labels too: a famous name, a one-two, a large headline. And when the label is wrong, we can stare at something for a long time and still not see it.

Looking from where I sit — in the technical area, hearing more spanners than engines — I have to be direct: Mercedes has the fastest single lap in Baku. But a race is not decided by raw speed, and a car is only fast while it is still running. McLaren may be hiding its true pace behind a chaotic afternoon; equally, Ferrari's gap may be exaggerated by differing engine modes and fuel loads. Practice does not lie, but it has never told the whole truth either.

Saturday morning will expose the real picture. The third session, on heavy fuel, will answer the question the first two deliberately avoided: how long can this Mercedes hold its pace before heat and mass grind it down? Can McLaren repair the floor properly overnight? And will the list of cars left in the garage grow longer?

Every perfect lap is a song, and I am only the one writing down the words. But some sporting moments never die, they only drift away from the clock — like the moment late this afternoon when the entire pit lane turned to look at a car that had stopped running. When the track falls silent, I realise I am lucky to still have a voice to comfort those who are waiting. Baku taught me that every engine desires a complete lap.