Esteban Ocon (P14): 6.5/10
Esteban Ocon seemed unusually far off his team mate Fernando Alonso's pace this weekend. He was two seconds adrift in first practice, before a gearbox problem ended his qualifying effort almost before it had begun, another worrying display of poor reliability at Alpine. It meant he started the sprint race on the back row, from where he did a decent job working his way up to 16th with a pass on Nicholas Latifi and benefitting from the Gasly/Zhou incident before getting stuck at the back of a queue of midfield runners. Points were always unlikely starting from so far back in Sunday's Grand Prix, but he gained three places on the opening lap and spent time running behind Lewis Hamilton until both pitted on lap 18. In the confusion of a super-busy pit lane, Alpine ushered him out of the pit box right in front of Hamilton in a prime example of unsafe release, inevitably earning him a five second penalty without which he would have been in a solid 11th place.
Lewis Hamilton (P13): 5/10
Right. Okay. What can you say about Lewis Hamilton's weekend in Imola? There is no alternative version of this anywhere in the multiverse where this has a positive spin. The prevailing wisdom was that with the return to Europe, the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix would be where the Mercedes fight back started and we'd start to see the first wave of upgrades that would put them back on track. Instead, if anything Hamilton seemed even further off the pace than he did in Bahrain, Jeddah and Melbourne. Tempers were frayed in the garage and team boss Toto Wolff acknowledged that the car was undriveable. P18 in first practice, P14 in qualifying, there was a surprise spurt to P4 in Saturday morning practice but by then the damage had been done. He actually lost a place in the sprint and then spent most of Sunday afternoon trying - and conspicuously failing - to pass an AlphaTauri before being lapped by Max Verstappen. It would be easy to blame all this on the W13, but compounding Hamilton's embarrassment is how well his team mate George Russell performed by comparison in the same equipment. making Hamilton look very much second best.
