©Mercedes
George Russell (Accident, Lap 1): 7/10
And so that wonderful run of consistency from George Russell has finally come to an end after nine consecutive points finishes in the top five. He'd doubtless been looking forward to his first home Grand Prix in a Mercedes but with Lewis Hamilton once more in the ascendancy it wasn't the greatest weekend of Russell's season, poor timing in the changing conditions of the final round of wet qualifying catching him out and leaving him eighth on the grid. It wasn't what the team had been hoping for with its latest upgrades and with the power of crowd support from local fans. As for the race, it lasted only a couple of hundred metres before he was clipped from behind by Pierre Gasly sending him into a spin that then took out Zhou Guanyu. We'll give him a pass on any question of culpability for the incident, just for the way his first instinct afterwards was to stop the car and sprint through the gravel to be there for Zhou as the safety team worked on extracting him. It's moments like that which show how much Formula 1 really is a family rather than a business.
Valtteri Bottas (Gearbox, Lap 21): 6.5/10
Valtteri Bottas enjoyed the wet conditions of FP1 so much that he topped the timesheets, a throw back to when that used to be a regular occurrence. His 11th position in second practice was a more accurate assessment of his true pace, but the return of the rain in time for qualifying must have given him hope of making it into the top ten on the grid for Sunday's race. Instead it was his rookie team mate Zhou Guanyu who benefitted from the conditions and made it into Q3, while Bottas missed the cut. On Sunday he got a good start the first time, less so the second, and was having a solid afternoon when the gearbox on the Alfa Romeo packed up after 20 laps and he retired to the sidelines for a restorative espresso.
