Both Aston Martins were the slowest on the straight in Baku: 311 km/h, 28 off the fastest

On the longest straight of the calendar, the slowest car was an Aston Martin. Both of them, in fact: in second practice in Baku neither went beyond 311 km/h at any measuring point, while Hadjar reached 339. We checked it against the official timing, session by session, and it holds. The comparison going round social media, the one with Formula 2, needs a caveat.

Second practice, driver by driver

This is the highest speed each driver recorded across the whole session, at any of the four points where timing measures it. It is not a single-lap figure: it is the best each of them managed in a full hour on track.

Between the faster Aston and the next car on the list, Piastri's McLaren, there are 11 km/h. Between the first and the last of the other twenty cars there are 17. In other words, the gap between the Astons and everyone else is almost as big as the spread across everyone else.

The Formula 2 claim

The line doing the rounds says that all 22 F2 cars were faster in their qualifying than either Aston in second practice. We could not check it against an official source: the FIA blocks downloads of its documents and the F2 website does not publish speeds. The figures come from the compilation by @F1BigData, and according to it they range from 318.3 km/h for Dino Beganovic to 328.4 for Joshua Dürksen.

If those figures are right, the claim is true: the slowest F2 car on the list beats the faster Aston by 7.3 km/h. But it is worth reading carefully. It does not compare two cars on the same lap or in the same session: it compares an F2 qualifying, where everyone is chasing the time, with an F1 practice session, where each team tests whatever it needs. An F1 car running heavy downforce, fuel or a long-run programme can lose plenty of top speed without that saying anything about its race pace.

First practice tells a different story

That is why one session is not enough. In first practice the Astons reached 320 km/h and were not last: Lando Norris (311) stayed below them. From one session to the next they lost 9 km/h. Something changed between the two, and practice does not tell us what: it could be the set-up, the fuel load or whatever the team was testing.

What does hold across both sessions is that the Aston sits at the back on the straight. It is the only team on the grid with a Honda engine in 2026, and Alonso and Stroll will also start the race from the back after fitting new engine parts, as F1 announced. Back in August we wrote that Aston had fixed the chassis, not the engine, and a two-kilometre straight is exactly where that shows. Nor is it the first time: in Miami there was already talk of an Aston slower than F2.

What to watch this weekend

The real test is qualifying, where everyone chases top speed at the same time. If the Aston is still more than ten km/h off the next car there, the problem is the car and not the practice programme. In Baku that matters more than anywhere: it is over two kilometres flat out, and in our count of retirements in Baku we already saw that pole guarantees very little there.

Our preview of the Grand Prix will come out after qualifying, in the Grand Prix panel, with the grid set and the penalties applied.