F1 today: the stories everyone's talking about — 28 Sept 2026

The dust has barely settled on Baku, yet the paddock’s attention is already split three ways: dissecting exactly how George Russell dismantled the field, working out what Red Bull’s muted response to a team-mate collision actually tells us about the pecking order there, and squaring the timetable oddity of a “Bahrain Grand Prix” that will not, in fact, be held in Bahrain. It’s a Monday round-up that captures Formula 1 at its most Formula 1: a dominant win nobody quite expected, a penalty row nobody can agree on, and a piece of calendar logistics so strange it needs its own explainer.

Russell’s Baku masterclass — and why Red Bull couldn’t compute it

The headline number from Azerbaijan wasn’t Russell’s margin at the flag, it was the double-digit gap he’d built by half-distance while Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar were still stuck behind Oscar Piastri’s McLaren. Mercedes’ own trackside read on the situation — reportedly likening Verstappen’s pace swings to him being tethered to “some sort of massive bungee cord” — is a nice piece of gallows humour, but it also points to something more substantive: Red Bull simply couldn’t get clean air, and without it their pace relative to Russell’s Mercedes looked wildly inconsistent lap to lap.

That’s the key context for James Hinchcliffe’s “cracked the code” theory doing the rounds. It’s a punchy way of framing a genuine question Mercedes will want answered honestly rather than romantically: has Russell found a genuine set-up or driving-style edge that’s unlocking performance his rivals haven’t identified, or did Baku’s characteristics — long straights, low-speed corners, a track that rewards a driver willing to commit early on the brakes — simply suit this specific Mercedes better than most of the calendar?

Why it matters beyond one result

• Baku has form as an outlier circuit. Its unique combination of a skinny, wall-lined castle section and a near-2km back straight has flattered unlikely winners before, so one dominant afternoon shouldn’t be read as a wholesale form reversal.
• But the manner of it matters. Russell wasn’t just quick, he was quick in a way that let him control the race from the front, denying Red Bull and McLaren any chance to use undercut or overcut strategy against him.
• If Mercedes genuinely have identified a repeatable set-up direction, the next few rounds — on tracks with a different demand profile — will tell us far more than Baku itself.

Our read: treat “cracked the code” as an interesting hypothesis rather than an established fact. Russell drove a near-faultless race and Mercedes’ execution was clean, but the sharper story is Red Bull’s inability to convert raw pace into position once they hit traffic — which brings us to their afternoon of harder questions.

Red Bull’s team orders dilemma exposes an awkward hierarchy question

Stuck behind Piastri and unable to make the pass stick, Verstappen and Hadjar found themselves fighting each other almost as much as the cars ahead — and Red Bull, notably, chose not to intervene with team orders to smooth the situation. On the surface that’s admirable non-interference, letting both drivers race. Read a little deeper, though, and it exposes a genuinely tricky internal calculation.

Verstappen remains the championship’s benchmark and Red Bull’s most obvious asset in any title fight; Hadjar, in his first full campaign in the senior car, is precisely the sort of driver a team needs to back rather than routinely subordinate if they want him to develop the confidence and race-craft that made him worth promoting in the first place. Ordering him aside for Verstappen every time they’re squabbling in traffic sends one message about the team’s priorities; declining to do so, and accepting the points cost of two cars fighting each other rather than the McLaren ahead, sends another.

Red Bull’s willingness to sit on their hands here suggests a team still calibrating exactly where Hadjar sits in that hierarchy — not yet willing to formally anoint him a clear number two, but also not so protective of Verstappen’s title equity that they’ll sacrifice a promising rookie’s race for marginal points gains in a non-podium battle. It’s a defensible call for Baku specifically. Whether it remains defensible if this kind of scenario repeats in a race where the constructors’ or drivers’ fight is on a knife-edge is a different question entirely, and one Christian Horner’s successors in the pit wall will need a firmer answer to sooner rather than later.

Colapinto’s Turn 1 flashpoint splits the paddock

The other major hangover from Baku is the fallout from Franco Colapinto’s role in triggering a multi-car pile-up at a safety car restart — an incident significant enough that the stewards handed down a penalty he must now serve as a five-place grid drop in Bahrain (or rather, in Malaysia — more on that shortly).

What’s striking isn’t the penalty itself but how divided reaction to it has been. Lando Norris has been vocal that the punishment doesn’t go far enough, effectively calling for a race ban given the scale of the collision it caused. Verstappen and Russell, by contrast, have pushed back on that framing — a reminder that even among the sport’s senior statesmen there’s no consensus on where the line sits between a “racing incident” born of aggression and a punishable lapse in restart discipline. Juan Pablo Montoya, never one to mince his words about what makes a driver worth watching, has gone further still, praising the aggression behind Colapinto’s move even while acknowledging its costly outcome.

Our take

Restarts are inherently high-risk — compressed fields, cold tyres, drivers straining for position all at once — and the stewards’ toolkit exists precisely because judgement calls here are rarely clean-cut. A five-place grid penalty is a meaningful sanction, not a token one, and the instinct to escalate every high-profile incident straight to a race ban risks flattening the distinction between reckless disregard and a genuinely committed racing move that simply didn’t come off. That said, Norris’s frustration is understandable: when a restart error takes out several cars and materially alters a grand prix result, the drivers on the receiving end are entitled to feel the punishment should more closely match the consequence, not just the intent. F1’s stewarding has long wrestled with exactly this tension, and Baku is only the latest data point in that ongoing debate rather than a verdict on it.

Bottas’s nightmare weekend, and the mystery behind it

If Baku was validation for Russell, it was close to the opposite for Valtteri Bottas. Being outqualified by well over a second and a half by Sergio Perez — his direct team-mate — is the kind of gap that demands scrutiny regardless of the machinery, and it was compounded by a crash that came close to reshaping the entire race result. The suggestion of a “bizarre” underlying cause behind that shunt is intriguing precisely because it complicates the easy narrative: if there was a genuine mechanical or set-up gremlin at play rather than simple driver error, then judging Bottas purely on Sunday’s outcome would be unfair.

Even so, the qualifying deficit to Perez can’t be explained away by a single-race quirk. Intra-team gaps of that magnitude are usually symptomatic of something deeper — whether that’s a driver still finding his rhythm with a particular car characteristic, a set-up philosophy that doesn’t suit him as naturally as it does his team-mate, or simply a difficult circuit on which confidence never arrived. Baku’s walls punish hesitation ruthlessly, and a driver even fractionally uncomfortable with the car’s rear-end behaviour under braking will bleed time there faster than almost anywhere else on the calendar. Whatever the specific cause of Sunday’s crash, the wider pattern is one his team will want addressed before it becomes a recurring theme.

Bahrain Grand Prix, Malaysia postcode — a calendar quirk worth understanding

Buried among the raceday storylines is a genuinely unusual scheduling development: round 16 of the season, still badged the Bahrain Grand Prix, will actually be staged in Malaysia. It’s the sort of naming anomaly that sounds like a typo until you remember Formula 1 has form here — commercial and contractual arrangements around race titles don’t always move in lockstep with the physical venue, and this is a clean example of the branding outliving (temporarily, at least) the location.

Practically, it means a welcome return to a circuit with real history in the sport after some years away, and fans wanting to catch it will need to double-check broadcast details given the shift, rather than assuming business as usual. Symbolically, it’s a reminder of how much of the modern calendar is shaped by contractual scaffolding as much as by geography — hosting rights, title sponsorships and promoter agreements creating situations that would have seemed faintly absurd in F1’s earlier, simpler eras.

Aston Martin’s upgrade signals intent for the run-in

Amid a season that has largely been about survival rather than progress, Aston Martin’s confirmation of a fresh upgrade package for the final stretch of 2026 is a small but notable statement. A team that has spent much of the year towards the back of the field bringing meaningful developments this late suggests either genuine gains identified through the season’s data, or a deliberate choice to prioritise learning for 2027 over chasing marginal points now. Either way, it’s worth watching whether it translates into a tangible step relative to their immediate rivals, because a team’s late-season trajectory often tells you more about their winter direction than anything from the first half of the year.

On the radar

• Russell’s restart under the microscope — separate scrutiny of how he managed a restart in Baku suggests stewards’ attention on that race extends beyond the Colapinto incident alone.
• An untelevised Hamilton team radio exchange has surfaced — worth watching for what it reveals about Ferrari’s internal mood once the full context emerges.
• Perez’s qualifying benchmark against Bottas sets an internal reference point Mercedes’ junior side of the Bottas seat will be measured against for the rest of the year.
• Red Bull’s next flashpoint — whether their hands-off approach to Verstappen–Hadjar scraps survives a higher-stakes race weekend.
• A grim anniversary — the throwback to one of F1’s most violent non-fatal crashes, 36 years on, a reminder of how far cockpit and barrier safety has come.
• Bahrain-in-Malaysia broadcast logistics — worth confirming viewing details given the unusual location switch.

The throughline across all of it is a sport once again proving that even a single race weekend can generate a fortnight’s worth of genuine debate — on pace, on penalties, on hierarchy, and on the increasingly elastic relationship between a grand prix’s name and its postcode.