Baku F1 Weekend: Tours & Things to Do

For one weekend in late September, Formula 1 takes over the middle of Baku. The Baku City Circuit is a street track — six kilometres and twenty turns of ordinary road, running past Government House, along the seafront boulevard, and through the tightest gap on the calendar beside the walls of the medieval Old City.

The 2026 Azerbaijan Grand Prix is on Saturday 26 September, round 17 of the season. It was moved from the Sunday to avoid Azerbaijan's Remembrance Day. Baku has been on the Formula 1 calendar since 2016.

If you are travelling for it, the useful thing to plan around is not the racing. It is that the circuit is built out of the streets you would otherwise be walking and driving on.

What the race weekend does to the city

The track wraps around much of the historic centre, so through the event the seafront boulevard, Azadliq Square and the roads circling Icherisheher are given over to it, and access shifts from day to day as sessions run. Exact closure dates, session times and grandstand access are published by the organisers — check those before you commit to a specific hour, because they change from year to year.

Two things follow from it, and they pull in opposite directions:

• Driving in the centre becomes slow or impossible. Crossing the circuit means using the designated bridges and crossings, and a taxi that would normally take ten minutes may not be able to complete the trip at all.
• Walking gets better. With the traffic gone, the Old City and the boulevard are quieter on foot than at any other time of year.

The gaps in a race weekend

Almost nobody flies in for a single afternoon. Most visitors arrive a day or two before the race and leave a day or two after it, which leaves real free time either side — and the part of the city that is fenced off is precisely the part most people would otherwise spend that time in.

The simple answer is to spend half a day outside the ring. You are back in the centre by afternoon, and you have seen something that is not a grandstand.

Trips that work around a closed centre

Gobustan is the obvious one. It is about an hour south of Baku on the coastal highway, nowhere near any closure, and it is a half day rather than a full one. The reserve holds thousands of rock carvings cut over roughly twelve thousand years, and the mud volcanoes beyond it are a genuinely strange landscape — cold grey mud, bubbling up in cones, in a country that has more of them than anywhere else on earth.

The Absheron sites — Ateshgah, the fire temple, and Yanardag, the hillside that has been burning continuously on escaping natural gas — sit north and east of the city, also clear of the circuit.

A walking tour of the Old City is the counterintuitive one. Icherisheher is inside the ring, but it is pedestrian anyway, and a race weekend is the one time the roads around it are free of cars.

Getting to and from the airport

Heydar Aliyev International is about half an hour from the centre in ordinary traffic, and the airport road itself is not part of the circuit. The delay is at the city end, where your driver may have to approach your hotel by an indirect route. Book a transfer with your flight number, give it more time than you think it needs, and tell your driver the hotel address rather than the nearest landmark — landmarks in central Baku may be on the wrong side of a barrier that week.