Max Verstappen finished second at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix on Sunday after starting eighth. Between his Q1 problem and the chequered flag on the Baku City Circuit, Red Bull swapped the internal combustion engine, turbocharger, exhaust and an ancillary component on his car, all drawn from what he had left in this year’s allocation. That kept him off an immediate penalty.

It also emptied the pool. Any further power unit change will trigger a grid drop.

That is why the question is not whether Verstappen takes a penalty, but where and when. He sounded as if he had already made his peace with it.

“Yeah, there definitely has to be a penalty at some point,” Verstappen said after the race.

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Laurent Mekies was not willing to sign off on the same conclusion.

“It is not clear yet,” Red Bull’s team principal told RacingNews365.

“It will very much depend on our analysis of the issues we had with his engine, which we had to take off the car, and whether or not we can use that engine again.”

Mekies said there had been “two different issues with the power unit” in qualifying. If bench testing shows the removed unit can be brought back into service, Verstappen might still get through the year on his existing allocation. If it cannot, the penalty is unavoidable.

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Where would Red Bull take the hit?

The precedent from earlier in the season sits right in front of them. Kimi Antonelli, who leads the Drivers’ Championship on 302 points, took his engine penalty at Monza after Mercedes ran out of allocation. The team’s own calculations, Toto Wolff explained, pointed to the Italian track as the best-value venue for the drop, with long straights and multiple overtaking zones giving a faster car room to recover.

Red Bull face a similar puzzle for Verstappen. He sits fourth in the standings on 163 points, 139 behind Antonelli with eight rounds left. The title is out of reach; picking a race where losing grid positions costs him least is what matters.

Verstappen himself pointed out that Baku, usually a natural fit for a penalty because of its 2.2-kilometre run to Turn 1, is more awkward under 2026’s regulations.

“Everyone completely drains the battery on the long straight,” he told reporters, describing how the new energy-deployment rules blunt the classic slipstream move.

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That leaves Red Bull waiting on the technical verdict from the removed engine before choosing a circuit.

Mekies, at least in Baku, preferred to talk about the drive than the reliability. Verstappen, he said, “was very, very strong from Friday onwards” and would have been on the front row without the trouble. George Russell took pole and beat Verstappen to the win by under two tenths of a second.

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