Valtteri Bottas (P2, 18 pts): 8/10
It's hard to actually criticise anything Valtteri Bottas did at Spa, but nonetheless there was a sense of frustration and disappointment about how things had turned out for the Finn - felt not least from Bottas himself. Things started well enough on Friday when he was 0.069s ahead of his Mercedes team mate Lewis Hamilton, but he lost ground in the afternoon and was half a second off Hamilton's pace in final practice. It was a deficit he was never able to claw back and he found himself in second place in every round of qualifying, and then on the grid for Sunday's race. He did his best to challenge Hamilton for the lead into La Source - if he'd pushed any harder there was a real risk of catastrophe - but couldn't catch and pass Hamilton in the run up to Eau Rouge, Radillion and down the Kemmel Straight. By the time they reached Les Combes the race had effectively been decided. Bottas was then somewhat irked to be informed he couldn't use one of his engine power boosts to have another shot at Hamilton ("I never heard that", he snapped when his race engineer told him the approach had been agreed before the race) and after that he simmered in second all the way to the finish.
Lewis Hamilton (Pole, P1, 25 pts): 9/10
Despite a thumping new track record in qualifying followed by a lights-to-flag victory on Sunday with a margin of eight seconds in hand over his Mercedes team mate, this weekend didn't have the same 'perfect ten' feel for Lewis Hamilton that he'd enjoyed in the previous outing in Spain. He had a relatively quiet day on Friday and looked to be under threat from Valtteri Bottas, Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo all setting very comparable times. But it was very different on Saturday where Hamilton finally topped a practice session and was then quickest in every round of qualifying to claim pole for the race. His start might have been a little on the conservative side and he was under pressure from Bottas through the opening corners, but once that was taken care of (plus a reprise performance with the post-safety car restart) the rest of the afternoon was fairly plain sailing, although memories of Silverstone left him anxious about the state of his tyres toward the end. The fact that he still pulled away from Bottas and Verstappen despite 'playing it safe' speaks volumes.
