Max Verstappen (P6, 8 pts): 7.5/10
How to rate Max Verstappen's weekend? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... He was in the top three in both Friday practice sessions, and if he appeared to lose ground in the damp Saturday morning session then it was surely only because he was marshalling his strength for that mighty effort in qualifying that snatched poll away from the Ferrari drivers. But then there were worrying signs of the return of that old 'red mist' problem of Verstappen's earlier seasons that we had thought banished, when - despite already having set the fastest lap in Q3 - he couldn't stop himself from ignoring the yellow flags for Valtteri Bottas' accident and pushing even harder at the end of the session. Worse, he then bragged about it afterwards and made it impossible for the stewards to turn a blind eye, and the result was a grid penalty. He then clashed with Lewis Hamilton at the start of the race, and in his subsequent haste to recover lost ground also ended up making contact with Bottas. After that there's no question that he put in another masterclass recovery drive all the way from the back, with an astonishing 65-lap run on a single set of hard tyres. It was this that won him the official driver of the day fan vote, but for us it was a distinctly flawed display from Max over the weekend as a whole.
