Kimi Raikkonen (P14): 6/10
Kimi Raikkonen equalled Rubens Barrichello's record for the number of Grand Prix starts this weekend, but in every other respect his Russian Grand Prix was unremarkable. After a not-bad 14th on Friday, he made a mistake in qualifying and spun at the start of his second Q1 run leaving him unable to improve his time, meaning that he was dead last in the session. When it came to the race on Sunday it took him eight laps to get past Nicholas Latifi, but having made the decision to start on the hard tyres he was then able to put an extended first stint to good use, rising to ninth place before finally making his solitary pit stop on lap 35 - the last man to make his first visit to pit lane during the race. Unfortunately a slow service plunged him back to 16th place, and while he picked up a couple of positions in the closing laps due to events further up the road, he effectively spent the rest of the day staring at the back of his old team mate Sebastian Vettel's Ferrari as part of a slow train of cars resistant to any effective overtaking.
Sebastian Vettel (P13): 5.5/10
Friday morning practice hinted at the possibility that Sebastian Vettel might have turned a corner when he finished ninth fastest and ahead of his Ferrari team mate Charles Leclerc. It was a similar situation on Saturday morning as well, but when it came to qualifying disaster struck during the second round when Vettel lost the back end of the SF1000 and spun into the barrier at turn 4, causing a red flag stoppage that nearly had disastrous consequences for Lewis Hamilton. It meant Vettel started the race from 14th on the grid, and he proved peculiarly inert for much of the afternoon. He got little help from the events of lap 1 but tried his best to extend his initial run on medium tyres to lap 30 by which time he was up in seventh place. However the switch to hard tyres for the remainder of the race did him no favours and he found himself stuck in a slow train of cars: what was striking is how a Ferrari (with a four-time world champion at the wheel) was seemingly totally unable to apply any real pressure to cars from its two engine customer teams for the rest of the afternoon.
