Nicholas Latifi (P16): 4/10
It seems that Formula 1's new rules and regulations have undone virtually all the progress that Nicholas Latifi has made behind the wheel of the Williams in the last two years. Second-slowest in both of Friday's practice sessions, he rose to the giddy heights of 18th on Saturday morning but at least he'd halved the time deficit to the leaders to just under two seconds. There was very little chance he would ever make the first cut in qualifying even before his red-flag inducing misunderstanding with Lance Stroll, and it was only penalties for Stroll and his own team mate Alex Albon that bumped him back up to 18th on the grid. At least this week he managed to avoid crashing out of the race itself, but that just lays bare another aspect of the Canadian's wretched weekend: while he plodded on at the back for almost the entire afternoon (until Fernando Alonso's late extra stop put the Alpine dead last in his stead), Albon started two places further back yet ended up clinching the team's first point of the season. The first law of motorsport is not to get beaten by your team mate, and Latifi was firmly - even embarrassingly - put in his place in Melbourne.
Yuki Tsunoda (P15): 5.5/10
After a promising (if less than reliable) time in the first two races of the season, AlphaTauri was strangely anonymous in Melbourne. Neither Yuki Tsunoda nor team mate Pierre Gasly cracked the top ten in FP1, while Gasly just managed P2 in the second session and Tsunoda himself tickled the heights of tenth in final practice despite complaining that he still didn't understand the handling of the AT03. Both failed to make it into the top ten pole shoot-out round, and Tsunoda lined up in a mere 13th place on the grid on Sunday. When the lights went out he was able to make quick gains by passing Valtteri Bottas and Carlos Sainz (whose Ferrari had gone into anti-stall at the start) and he settled into 11th place. Unfortunately he pitted just before the safety car came out for Sebastian Vettel's accident, leaving him unable to take advantage of a 'free stop' opportunity and down in 17th as a result. With Melbourne proving a difficult track on which to overtake, he then found himself stuck in a long chain of cars with little prospect of progress. Worse, as the afternoon went on he was picked off by Mick Schumacher, Guanyu Zhou and Kevin Magnussen. That this was his first time at Albert Park must be taken into account, but even so this was a dispiriting weekend for Yuki.
