Pierre Gasly (P10, 1 pt): 7/10
AlphaTauri are having a quite extraordinary run of luck so far in 2021, most of it bad despite the fact that the AT02 clearly has a lot of pace and promise. That was proved once again by the way Pierre Gasly finished Friday practice in sixth place, and he was still in the top ten on Saturday morning. But when it came to qualifying he couldn't reproduce that speed and missed the final cut, forcing him to line up in 12th. And that 'line up' proved a bone of contention, when he was handed a five second penalty in the race for being out of position on the grid. That dropped him to the back of the field when he made his first pit stop on lap 19, and the next dozen laps were all about catching and passing the usual Haas and Williams suspects. After that he found himself running in the tyre tracks of Sebastian Vettel, but Gasly's second stint ran ten laps longer than the Aston Martin and so when he finally came in for his final stop he was on fresher rubber. That allowed him to easily dispense with Vettel, Raikkonen and Stroll in the closing laps and he finally peaked just inside the top ten with four laps to go, salvaging a point for the team after Yuki Tsunoda's early retirement.
Esteban Ocon (P9, 2 pts): 8/10
Both Esteban Ocon and Fernando Alonso finished Friday practice with a flourish in fourth and fifth respectively on the timesheets. While they fell back on Saturday morning, both Alpines duly managed to make it into the final round of qualifying, with Ocon going on to beat the two-time world champion to take an impressive fifth on the grid for the race. Whether the team should then have put both drivers on the same one stop strategy is an interesting question, because it certainly didn't do either of them any favours. Ocon immediately lost two spots at the start to Daniel Ricciardo and Sergio Perez but then stabilised in seventh through to his planned stop on lap 23, after which the strategy required him to complete the remaining 43 laps on a new set of mediums. That was the absolute limit of what could be achieved: Alonso, on the same strategy but having stopped two laps earlier than Ocon, ended up plummeting down the order in the concluding laps. Ocon just about managed to make the distance but with nothing to spare, allowing the two-stopping Ricciardo, Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris to make easy work of passing him before the chequered flag put an end to the slow torture, with Ocon having done absolutely everything asked of him.
