Sergio Perez (Retired, Lap 43): 9/10
Sergio Perez certainly made the most of the Racing Point this weekend, and it's deeply unfair that he appears so early in our driver review of the weekend. He was in the top four in both of Friday's practice sessions, and after a subdued FP3 he went on to secure a spot on the third row of the grid for Sunday's race. Crucially it was on the cleaner side of the grid where the racing line had built up plenty of grip and he got an excellent start, passing Valtteri Bottas and Alex Albon to go into turn 1 in third place. After the restart there was little he could do about the superior speed of Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen ahead, but he had a podium firmly in his grip the entire afternoon. And then with four laps to go the engine let go, first with oil and smoke and then with actual flame (rather disturbing in view of Romain Grosjean's earlier predicament) and Perez became only the third retirement of the evening. If he had secured a second consecutive podium then his claim to an F1 seat somewhere on the 2021 grid would surely have been irresistible.
Kevin Magnussen (P17): 6/10
This was a weekend when Kevin Magnussen was probably quite relieved not to be in the spotlight, at least not in the way that his team mate Romain Grosjean found himself. Instead he had a rather unassuming weekend in Bahrain, and as such is probably a better indicator of Haas' current malaise. His practice results showed a slow slide backwards - 15th, 16th and 18th - and sure enough it was in 18th that he started the race on Sunday. He made up some positions initially but damaged his front wing at the restart dropping him to the back. Adopting what was essentially a one-stop strategy from then on, Magnussen briefly rose to 11th as others made their own stops, but really he was circulating at the back for long spells. In any case it would be easy to understand if his heart just wasn't in it, given what he'd just seen Grosjean go through. He was certainly uninterested in talking about the race afterwards: "I'm just happy that we've still got Romain," he said in the team's post-race comments. "That's really all from me today."
