Fernando Alonso (P6, 8 pts): 8.5/10
Kimi Raikkonen's retirement at the end of the season will leave Fernando Alonso as the oldest driver on the grid, but the two-time world champion seems to have discovered the secret of eternal life behind the wheel and once again looked like a man half his age with top six finishes in both of Friday's free practice sessions followed by P5 in Saturday morning practice. He slightly underperformed in qualifying and was only ninth at the end of Q3, one spot behind his much younger Alpine team mate Esteban Ocon, but that was immediately put right when the lights went out on Sunday and Alonso gained two spots after tangling with Antonio Giovinazzi on the first lap. After that there was little more that Alonso could do and he spent the majority of the afternoon running in seventh place between Carlos Sainz and Ocon, until he got a chance to jump the Ferrari in the last few hundred metres of the race on the final lap and pick up sixth at the line, a reminder that regardless of his age Alonso will always be one of nature's youthful, tough-as-nails streetfighters at heart.
Charles Leclerc (P5, 10 pts): 8/10
After a rare mistake in practice at Belgium last week, Charles Leclerc wanted a clean, trouble-free outing at Zandvoort and that's pretty much exactly what he got. Fourth in FP1 and quickest in FP2, the Monegasque went into qualifying hoping for good things. Ideally that would have meant fourth on the grid but Pierre Gasly proved to be just a little bit too quick on the day, and so Leclerc settled down to share the third row with his Ferrari team mate Carlos Sainz. The lack of overtaking opportunities gave him scant chance of improving his situation when the lights went out, and - save for 11 laps between Gasly's pit stop and his own - Leclerc spent the entire afternoon in fifth place with Sainz running right behind him as his de facto wingman. "The start was good but then I didn't want to take too many risks," he reported afterwards. "We were very close in pace to the car ahead, but it was just not enough today."
