Nine Baku races. No back-to-back winner.
Pérez and Verstappen have each won twice at Baku, but nobody has won consecutive editions—and defending winner Verstappen could become the first in 2026.
Results through the 2025 Azerbaijan GP. Includes the 2016 European GP at Baku. Excludes Sprints.
Winning at Baku once is difficult enough. Following it with another victory on Formula 1’s next visit has so far proved beyond everyone.
Nine Grands Prix have produced seven different winners. Sergio Pérez and Max Verstappen are the only drivers with two victories, but another name separates each driver’s wins.
That gives Verstappen something new to chase at the 2026 Azerbaijan Grand Prix. After winning in 2025, he returns with the chance to become Baku’s first back-to-back Grand Prix winner.
Even when the team repeats, the driver changes
The pattern has survived stretches when one team kept winning.
Mercedes won in 2018 and 2019, but Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas shared those victories. Their results tell a particularly frustrating story for Bottas: he was leading late in 2018 when a tire failure handed Hamilton the opportunity. A year later, Bottas won with Hamilton second.
Red Bull then won three consecutive editions, from 2021 through 2023. Again, the driver changed each time: Pérez, Verstappen, Pérez.
The 2022 and 2023 races even produced Red Bull one-twos in opposite orders. Both defending winners finished second to their teammate. Baku didn’t need a retirement or a change in the leading team to keep the sequence going.
Seven names across nine editions
Baku’s first six Grands Prix all had different winners. Pérez finally became its first repeat winner in 2023, adding to his 2021 victory.
Oscar Piastri then became the seventh different winner in 2024, before Verstappen joined Pérez on two wins in 2025.
2016: Nico Rosberg
2017: Daniel Ricciardo
2018: Lewis Hamilton
2019: Valtteri Bottas
2021: Sergio Pérez
2022: Max Verstappen
2023: Sergio Pérez
2024: Oscar Piastri
2025: Max Verstappen
There was no race in 2020. The comparison is between consecutive editions, so 2019 and 2021 count as neighboring races in this sequence.
Verstappen gets another chance
Verstappen has been in this position before. He arrived in 2023 as the previous Baku winner and finished second to Pérez.
His 2025 victory gives him another opportunity. A win in 2026 would make him both the first driver to win consecutive Baku Grands Prix and the first to reach three victories here.
The history adds interest, but it doesn’t predict the result. A list of changing winners can’t tell us who’ll have the pace this year.
It does give the defending winner a clear target: nine editions into Baku’s Formula 1 history, nobody has managed to put their name on two neighboring rows.
