George Russell (P14): 6/10
A spectacular run of mid-season successes secured George Russell his route out of Williams and into the Mercedes line-up for 2022 but since then it's been back to the daily grind for the young Briton. This was another of those weekends where he seemed unable to do anything to bring the weekend to life, although he was consistently ahead of his team mate Nicholas Latifi. P11 in FP1 and P12 in FP3 were punctuated by 19th in FP2, but he still did the business in qualifying and made it through to Q2 - although that's the very least we expect of him these days. In any case, an engine change penalty rendered all this moot and he was consigned to the back row for the start of the race. A terrific first lap saw him gain six places, and problems for Esteban Ocon promoted him to 13th before the first round of pit stops, but it was no surprise that he struggled to contain the threat from the significantly faster cars of Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso in the second half of the race. "Once they were past it was a long, lonely race from then on in," he agreed. "It was a tricky weekend overall but none of our rivals scored any points."
Kimi Raikkonen (P13): 6.5/10
Kimi Raikkonen might be the oldest driver on the grid in 2021 but he can still scrap as well as any teenage street racer when he wants to, as Sunday demonstrated. It hadn't exactly looked particularly promising during practice, and once again didn't seem particularly bothered about qualifying where he missed the first cut at the end of Q1. But as we've seen many times in the past, it was a different matter in the race itself. He gained three spots on the opening lap and briefly scaled the dizzy heights of sixth place before making his first pit stop on lap 13 which dropped him behind Fernando Alonso. The pair had a spirited battle for position that was the subject of same entertaining radio communications between Alonso and the Alpine pit wall, after which Raikkonen was ushered past his team mate Antonio Giovinazzi in the hope that he would be able to find a way past the AlphaTauri of Yuki Tsunoda ahead. A welcome point for tenth place looked secure when he buckled under pressure from Sebastian Vettel and ran off track. "I got some floor damage [from my battle with Alonso]," he explained. "It didn't really affect the balance of the car, but we seemed to run out of tyres a lot quicker afterwards ... I didn't really have much rears left just as I tried to push hard to stay ahead of Sebastian."
