Lando Norris (P10, 1 pt): 8/10
Happy birthday Lando! He would doubtless have been hoping for a more substantial gift this weekend than a solitary championship point, but the lack of reward shouldn't detract from a pretty good weekend for the McLaren driver especially given the team's horror show in FP1 where neither Norris nor his team mate Daniel Ricciardo were anywhere near the top ten. They pulled it together in qualifying and Norris had the satisfaction of beating the Aussie to seventh place on the grid for the sprint race. This improved to fifth for Sunday's Grand Prix and he got a great start down the outside only to pull across the path of Carlos Sainz and slice his left rear tyre open on the Ferrari's front wing end plate. After that any sort of worthwhile recovery seemed highly unlikely, but a safety car helped close up the field and he successfully worked away at getting back into the points by the finish. With Ricciardo sidelined with a power unit failure, Norris' sterling efforts ended up yielding the only one taken by McLaren this weekend.
Fernando Alonso (P9, 2 pts): 7.5/10
Alpine have been a bit off the boil in recent weeks but they put in a very capable performance in Sao Paulo. Both Fernando Alonso and his team mate Esteban Ocon were comfortably in the top ten in FP1, and Alonso duly pipped Ocon to make it into the final round of qualifying on Friday afternoon. Unfortunately he slipped backwards in the sprint race after opting to start on medium tyres while those around him gambled on quicker softs, and so he lined up 12th on the grid for the Grand Prix where he had an entertaining time tangling with the likes of Lance Stroll, Sebastian Vettel, Pierre Gasly and Daniel Ricciardo. The timing of the Virtual Safety Cars somewhat compromised his strategy but he caught up with Ocon in the second half and was able to follow the Frenchman through the field into the top ten, with both men in the points for the first time since Monza. "It's good to see both cars in the points again and we are still level with AlphaTauri for fifth [in the constructors standings] heading into Qatar next weekend."
