Chaos in Baku: Vettel's Road Rage and Ricciardo's Improbable Win

The Baku City Circuit runs through the ancient streets of the Azerbaijani capital, past the medieval walled city, along the Caspian seafront and back through wide boulevard sections that produce the highest speeds of any street circuit on the calendar. In its second year as a Formula 1 venue, it also produced one of the most bizarre races in the sport's modern history.

Behind the safety car, which had been deployed for an incident earlier in the race, Sebastian Vettel was following Lewis Hamilton when he felt — or believed he felt — Hamilton brake-checking him. The Ferrari and the Mercedes touched. Vettel, furious, pulled alongside Hamilton on the following straight and steered deliberately into the side of the Mercedes. It was an act with no parallel in recent Formula 1 history — a world champion driving his car into a rival behind the safety car. He received a 10-second stop-and-go penalty that ended any realistic chance of a good result.

At the front of the race, Daniel Ricciardo was assembling something remarkable from unpromising circumstances. He had taken a grid penalty for an engine change and started deep in the field, but his Red Bull was quick and Baku's combination of long straights and tight corners suited him. He picked his way through the chaos — and there was considerable chaos, the race producing safety cars, accidents and mechanical failures throughout — and came through to lead when it mattered.

Lance Stroll, the 18-year-old Canadian driving for Williams in his debut season, produced one of the outstanding drives of a remarkable afternoon. He navigated the entire distance without error, took no penalties, and finished on the podium — the first Canadian to achieve that result at a street circuit, and his first podium in what was only his sixth Formula 1 start.

Daniel Ricciardo won the Azerbaijan Grand Prix for Red Bull, his characteristic smile and the trophy the bookends of a drive that required patience and opportunism in equal measure. Lance Stroll finished third in the Williams — a podium that was celebrated within the team as a result that exceeded all expectations. Valtteri Bottas was second for Mercedes.

Sebastian Vettel's penalty was accompanied by a formal summons and a suspended ban. His clash with Hamilton — two championship protagonists making contact on a public road with the safety car leading the field — was condemned widely and excused by almost nobody, including eventually Vettel himself.

The 2017 championship was one of the most competitive since the Vettel-Alonso fights of the early 2010s, Hamilton and Vettel trading the lead with neither able to pull away decisively. Vettel's Baku penalty cost him significant points at a moment when he was leading the standings. Hamilton extended his advantage and went on to win the championship by 46 points — a margin that, had Baku gone differently, could have been smaller.

Ricciardo's win — his fourth in Formula 1 — was the product of a season in which he consistently outperformed the results the Red Bull's pace should have delivered. His ability to find wins in chaotic races, to stay out of trouble while others did not, made him one of the most effective drivers of his generation.

June 2017 was the month Donald Trump announced the United States would withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement — a decision that dominated the global political conversation for weeks and fundamentally altered the international diplomacy of climate change. The UK had just held a snap general election in which Theresa May lost her parliamentary majority, a result that further complicated an already deeply uncertain Brexit negotiation.

Azerbaijan in 2017 was a country using Formula 1, as several nations had done before it, to project an image of modernity and openness that its human rights record would not otherwise support. The Baku City Circuit was genuinely spectacular as a sporting venue — the medieval old city and the Caspian Sea providing backdrops that no purpose-built circuit could match. The sport's presence there was commercially pragmatic and geopolitically complicated in the way that Formula 1's expansion into non-traditional markets had often been.

Hot and dry, Baku in late June delivering temperatures around 32°C on the circuit surface. The heat added to the physical demands of a race that was already mentally exhausting through its sheer unpredictability. The long pit straight — one of the longest in Formula 1 — was exposed to a moderate breeze off the Caspian, which had some effect on rear wing settings but did not alter the fundamental nature of the afternoon.