George Russell (P10, 1 pt): 8/10
Getting the nod about his move to Mercedes in 2021 doesn't seem to gave blunted any of George Russell's competitive edge: this was the second time in four races that he's qualified in the top three, and the fourth time in the last five races that he's collected points. And to think that in his prior 47 outings for Williams he had been continually frustrated by missing out on the top ten! Russell once again proved quicker than his steadily improving team mate Nicholas Latifi throughout Friday practice, and after a close-run thing at the start of qualifying he made it into the final top ten pole shoot-out round. Daring to be the first driver on slicks he came away with a rich reward of third on the grid ahead of his future team mate Lewis Hamilton. He did impressively well to hold on to the position over the opening stint but his early pit stop on lap 13 dropped him behind Lance Stroll and left him vulnerable to passes by Daniel Ricciardo, Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc. Russell survived the late downpour and held on to his tenth place finish, leaving the Briton broadly happy with his day. "I thought we had a really strong race today, we held our own and made no silly mistakes," he said. "It wasn't the dream result but before the weekend if we'd have been offered 10th and another point, we would have taken it."
Sergio Perez (P9, 2 pts): 7/10
It was a somewhat anonymous weekend for Sergio Perez, who was one and a half seconds off his Red Bull team mate Max Verstappen in opening practice. As the team's second driver his role is to pick up the pieces if any misfortune should befall the Dutchman, and this was the perfect opportunity for him to demonstrate his worth after Verstappen was consigned to the back row of the grid with engine penalties. But Perez was unable to step up to the plate, and while he scraped through to the final round of qualifying he was too late switching to the slicks when the track dried and ended up too far down the grid to be of any significant use to the team in terms of strategy against arch-rivals Mercedes. Usually Perez can make up for this with his race day performance, and he was indeed able to use a long 37-lap first stint on hard tyres to briefly take the lead of the race after everyone else made their stops. A slow service compromised his campaign but fresh tyres subsequently enabled him to get the jump on Daniel Ricciardo and Carlos Sainz for a prospective podium. Then the rain hit and Perez was badly caught out: "We were on for a great result with a podium through pure merit," he explained. "I decided to take the risk in staying out on the slicks instead of pitting for inters ... If it then dried up those of us on the slicks would have made it work and those on the inters would have seen their race destroyed [but] in hindsight the slick wasn't the right tyre."
