Azerbaijan Grand Prix 2027. A street race around the old city walls, and a hotel on the right side of the closures.

Baku does not fence off a park. It hands over its main seafront avenue, the square in front of Government House and the tight streets around the walls of Icheri Sheher, the medieval walled town, and it does so for about eight days. The pattern published each year is the same: the circuit streets close in the small hours several days before the first practice session and reopen the morning after the race. Inside the closed area, access is by resident permit only, and the main roads that are kept open are transit corridors where stopping, parking and setting anyone down are all prohibited.

That last point is the one that catches visitors out. A road being open does not mean a car can drop you on it. If your hotel is inside the perimeter, your luggage arrives on foot for a week, and so do you. There is nothing unusual or badly run about it: that is simply how a street circuit in a working capital has to operate, and it is manageable once you know it before you book rather than after.

There are two sensible strategies and they are opposites. The first is to stay inside the perimeter, walk everywhere for the week, and accept that the car meets you at the edge on the days you leave the circuit area. The second is to stay outside it, keep full use of a car and driver, and be dropped as close to a pedestrian crossing point as the traffic plan allows each day. The first suits people whose whole weekend is the race. The second suits anyone with meetings, dinners out of town, or a party that includes people who are not going to every session.

We will tell you plainly which we would choose for your group, and we plan the drop off and collection points before you arrive rather than negotiating them at a police line. The metro is genuinely useful here and several stations sit within the closed area, so the best plan often mixes a car, a short metro ride and a walk. Cars in Azerbaijan are arranged through operators we know, with one person at Odyssey responsible for the whole itinerary.

Heydar Aliyev International is the only realistic field for the race, about twenty kilometres north east of the city on a good road. It is a modern airport with business aviation facilities, and the constraint on a Grand Prix weekend is the same as everywhere else: parking for four days and a departure slot on Sunday evening when every other aircraft wants one. Book the departure at the same time as the arrival and be relaxed about the aircraft repositioning in between.

From London the sector is roughly five to six hours, which puts it comfortably inside a long range aircraft and within reach of a super midsize for a small party. We arrange the aircraft, the handling and the cars at both ends as one job. See private jet charter, super midsize jets and heavy jets.