P4: Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes 8.10/10 (170 in total)
Valtteri 2.0 arrived with a bang when he won the Australian Grand Prix by 20 seconds over his Mercedes team mate Lewis Hamilton, in the process duly picking up F1i's top mark of 9.5 for the race. For a moment it looked like Bottas might be a genuine challenger for the title, but unfortunately he couldn't sustain that level of performance over the course of the entire season. We did rate the Finn's other three winning performances in Baku, Suzuka and Austin equally as highly and were also very impressed by his second place in the Spanish GP, but there were a few more overage weekends scattered through the season. Germany was undoubtedly the worst of them, where he ended up clipping the kerb in wet conditions and running into the gravel while contending for a podium. The points he lost that weekend pretty much put paid to any realistic title hopes he might have had, although the battle remained mathematically open until the United States where Bottas was the last man still in contention. He went on to finish the season with second place and a 9.0 rating at Abu Dhabi, and a sense that he's already mentally rebooting in preparation for 2020.
