Verstappen crashes after life-threatening blowout as Hamilton suffers 'magic button' mishap

Baku has produced few weekends stranger than the 2021 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, a race remembered less for Sergio Pérez's victory than for two separate, unrelated disasters that struck Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton.

Neither driver scored a point. Neither incident had anything to do with the other. Yet together they reshaped a title fight that would run to the final corner of the season in Abu Dhabi.

Verstappen had led comfortably from Ferrari's Charles Leclerc and looked set for a routine win when, on lap 46, his left-rear tyre exploded at more than 300km/h on the approach to the main straight. The Red Bull speared into a wall, immediately ending the Dutch driver's afternoon.

"I didn't feel anything up until the moment that I suddenly went to the right; the tyre just blew off the rim, and it's not a nice impact to have; it's quite a dangerous place to have a tyre blowout at that speed," Verstappen said afterwards.

He had noticed nothing beforehand. He added: "Everything felt very comfortable. I never felt any vibrations or anything whatsoever. Very strange that this happened."

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Pirelli's verdict

Lance Stroll had suffered an almost identical left-rear failure earlier in the race, and Pirelli launched a formal investigation into both incidents. Its conclusion, delivered over a week later, cleared the tyres themselves of any manufacturing fault.

"The process established that there was no production or quality defect on any of the tyres; nor was there any sign of fatigue or delamination," Pirelli said in a statement.

"The causes of the two left-rear tyre failures on the Aston Martin and Red Bull cars have been clearly identified. In each case, this was down to a circumferential break on the inner sidewall, which can be related to the running conditions of the tyre, in spite of the prescribed starting parameters (minimum pressure and maximum blanket temperature) having been followed."

Both Red Bull and Aston Martin had complied with Pirelli's mandated starting pressures and blanket temperatures, meaning the failures stemmed from how the tyres behaved dynamically on Baku's abrasive, high-speed surface rather than any error on the pit wall.

The FIA and Pirelli responded by tightening tyre-check protocols and issuing an updated technical directive ahead of the French Grand Prix, aimed at monitoring in-race pressures more closely.

The chaos was compounded by race control's hesitation. Leclerc's furious radio outburst as debris littered the straight became one of the enduring soundbites of the weekend.

"That's a joke, that's a joke," he shouted. "Put the f***ing safety car out straight away. Why are they waiting?"

Hamilton undone by 'brake magic'

Verstappen's crash triggered a red flag and a standing restart, setting up the second pivotal moment of the afternoon. Hamilton lined up second, directly behind Pérez, and made a strong getaway, only to run straight through Turn 1 and out of contention.

The cause was traced to Mercedes' so-called 'brake magic' switch, a setting designed to shift brake bias sharply forward on formation and warm-up laps to transfer heat from the front discs into the rims and tyres. Hamilton had switched it off before the restart, but contact with Pérez as the two jostled for position nudged it back on without his knowledge.

"On the restart, I think when Checo moved over towards me, I clipped a switch, and it basically switches the brakes off, so I just went straight," he said. "I had no idea that I'd even touched it."

Team radio captured his confusion in real time: "Did I leave the magic on? I could have sworn I turned that off," he said.

Team principal Toto Wolff was quick to defend his driver afterwards. "It cannot be called a mistake," he said. "He touched a button, and the brake balance changed. It went right forward, and obviously the car wouldn't stop. It was a finger problem."

Hamilton himself offered a more nuanced take when reflecting on it days later.

"I don't even count it as a mistake," he said. "You can't always be perfect [but] a mistake is where you drive off the track through missing your braking point or hitting the wall.

"But it was an unforced error, something we had that was sitting there that could have happened at any point, and it unfortunately bit us pretty hard."

Mercedes duly reworked the steering wheel switchgear layout before the following race in France to prevent a repeat.

The upshot was stark: neither championship contender scored, leaving the standings essentially undisturbed but exposing how fine the margins had become between Verstappen and Hamilton that summer.

Baku, in the end, changed nothing on the scoreboard and everything about how fragile that title fight really was.