F1 Azerbaijan Grand Prix: Best Bets for the Baku Street Race

F1 heads to Baku after both selections landed in our Italian Grand Prix best bets, with Kimi Antonelli's 3/1 podium finish and Pierre Gasly's 7/4 points finish both coming good at Monza.

Two winners from two selections at the Temple of Speed sets us up nicely heading into round 15 of the season, and Formula 1 wastes no time in giving us another shot, with the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. Antonelli backed up his Monza podium with victory at the inaugural Madrid race too, meaning the championship leader now arrives in Baku off the back of consecutive wins and an 81-point cushion over Mercedes team-mate George Russell.

There is a notable twist to this weekend's action before we even get to the racing. Saturday, not Sunday, is race day, with the entire schedule shifted forward by a day to avoid clashing with Azerbaijan's national Remembrance Day. Practice threw up a mixed picture too, with Russell fastest overall ahead of Antonelli, Max Verstappen and the Ferrari pair of Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, while Gasly's Alpine was a respectable seventh quickest.

With that in mind, here are our three best bets for Saturday's Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

TIP 1: MAX VERSTAPPEN - PODIUM FINISH - 1pt

Best odds of 11/8 at BetVictor while publishing.

Red Bull have won four of the last five Azerbaijan Grands Prix, and Verstappen himself was the man who took last year's victory in dominant fashion. No driver has ever won back-to-back races at Baku, a statistic that works against Antonelli extending his winning run to three, and history suggests the Baku City Circuit has a habit of throwing up different winners to the ones dominating elsewhere on the calendar.

Verstappen's underlying form this season also supports the case. He finished third at Monza and second in Madrid, and fastest in Friday's Third Free Practice session in Baku. Red Bull's long-standing strength in a straight line should suit a circuit built around one of the longest full-throttle sections on the calendar.

At 11/8, backing the driver with the strongest recent Baku pedigree to add another podium to his tally looks like solid value, particularly with a title fight elsewhere in the field taking some pressure off Red Bull's own weekend.

TIP 2: RED FLAG - YES - 1pt

Best odds of 10/11 at Betfred while writing.

Baku is one of the F1 calendar's most unforgiving circuits, and the addition of two extra cars to the grid this season could make an already crowded street circuit even harder to navigate. The 6.003km layout combines long, high-speed sections with the notoriously narrow castle section, where there is very little room for drivers to recover from a mistake.

A red flag is certainly not guaranteed, with just two of the nine previous Baku races being stopped, in 2017 and 2021. However, the Safety Car has appeared in five of those nine races, while a Safety Car or Virtual Safety Car featured in eight.

The most recent race also showed how quickly things can go wrong. Oscar Piastri crashed on the opening lap in 2025, bringing out the Safety Car, while qualifying had already produced a remarkable six red flags, an F1 record.

The 2017 race is another reminder of how incidents can escalate in Baku. Three Safety Car periods were followed by a red flag after the Pérez-Ocon collision left debris across the circuit. In 2021, two high-speed tyre failures eventually led to another red flag, with Max Verstappen's crash bringing the race to a halt with only a handful of laps remaining.

TIP 3: CHARLES LECLERC - FASTEST LAP - 0.5pt

Best odds of 10/1 at bet365 while publishing.

Charles Leclerc is an interesting long-shot for fastest lap in Baku, particularly given his outstanding record around this circuit. The Ferrari driver holds the Baku lap record at 1:43.009, set in 2019, and has consistently been one of the quickest drivers here over a single lap. He took four consecutive poles in Azerbaijan from 2021 to 2024, underlining how well he can extract performance from the Ferrari around the street circuit.

Leclerc also has recent evidence that Ferrari can be competitive on the Baku layout. In 2024, he finished second in the Grand Prix after starting from pole and was setting the fastest lap during the early stages of the race while leading.

The Ferrari driver was also third fastest in Thursday's opening practice for the 2026 Azerbaijan GP, just 0.404 seconds off George Russell's benchmark, suggesting Ferrari are at least in the conversation for outright pace this weekend.

The fastest-lap market can also be heavily influenced by race circumstances. If there is a Safety Car or red flag, drivers can make a late pit stop for fresh soft tyres and attack the fastest lap in the closing stages. Baku's history of interruptions makes that particularly relevant here and we have seen Ferrari save their soft tyres for the latter stages of the race in the past few Grand Prixs as well.

At 10/1, Leclerc therefore looks an intriguing outside option. His record of qualifying strongly at Baku, his outright lap record and Ferrari's historical competitiveness around the circuit all make the price worth considering.