Title rivals Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri start the Azerbaijan Grand Prix seventh and ninth following a chaotic qualifying session that ran to double its normal length.

The Baku street circuit is notorious for creating incident - its combination of long straights and tight, right-angled corners are bounded by walls, so mistakes tend to be punished.

This time, difficult conditions created a challenge that led to six drivers - more than a quarter of the field - crashing during qualifying. The resulting six red flags was a Formula 1 record.

Piastri said: "You add in wind, kind of a tyre uncertainty, a little bit of rain, cold conditions on a street track like this and stuff's going to happen."

Stuff very much happened.

Williams driver Alex Albon started the cascade of accidents when he hit the inside wall at Turn One early in the first session.

Albon described it "a bit of a rookie mistake", saying he was caught out by the difference in grip between that lap and his first one.

But that difference in grip was caused by the wind. If the wind is head on, it gives the car more grip, as the aerodynamics become more effective.

So, turning in at the same point, the car slides less and turns more than expected; hence the accident.

It doesn't make the error forgiveable, but it does explain how something that all racing drivers hate - hitting the inside wall - can happen.

Norris described the difficulty of driving on a track with such small margin of error in such changeable conditions as "quite incredible".

He added: "I wish everyone could understand how difficult it was with the wind. I would say half the crashes you saw today were probably because of wind. Not all. Some of them were just braking too late and then trying to go for something that's not there."

Azerbaijan Grand Prix: 'Lando Norris misses opportunity in chaotic Baku qualifying'