Outside of the dominant polesitter Charles Leclerc, stand-ins Ollie Bearman and Franco Colapinto were the unquestionable stars of qualifying for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, claiming big wins against experienced, highly-regarded Formula 1 team-mates.

Colapinto - Williams’s recent replacement for Logan Sargeant - reached Q3 and beat team-mate Alex Albon to ninth.

Bearman - standing in for the banned Kevin Magnussen at his 2025 team Haas - was on the cusp of Q3 in 11th, three places ahead of team-mate Nico Hulkenberg.

Both Bearman and Colapinto are in their second weekends as F1 race drivers. Both had to dust themselves off and go again after crashes earlier in the weekend. And they were - by the standards of F1 drivers talking about their team-mates - positively lavished with praise by Hulkenberg and Albon respectively.

But only one of Bearman - a Baku 'double' winner in Formula 2 last year - and Colapinto - who has remarkably never been to the track before this weekend - was truly content in the end.

How Colapinto beat Albon

The obvious caveat in this battle was that only one of the two Williams cars - Colapinto's - actually got to do a second push lap in the final qualifying segment.

Albon had narrowly shaded Colapinto on their first runs in Q3, but was then released too early out of his Williams pit box as the team tried to hook him up with a tow.