Lance Stroll (Retired, Lap 40): 5.5/10
As we've already seen when talking about Sebastian Vettel, this wasn't a good weekend for Aston Martin who seemed really under the weather and lacking performance at Monza. Lance Stroll's best outing was in FP1 when he was P15 and comfortably faster than Vettel's stand-in Nyck de Vries by over a second, although the Dutch driver had been handed more test work including a huge aero-rig slowing him down for the opening runs. But Stroll was P18 and slower than Vettel in FP2, and bottom of the times in FP3, and both Astons missed the cut at the end of the first round of qualifying with the AMR22 having the slowest straight-line speed of any team. Grid penalties ahead of them meant Stroll ended up started the race from P11 just behind Vettel, and they both maintained their positions well on an opening set of softs. Vettel had already been forced to retire by the time Stroll's first pit stop dropped him to P18, and he never recovered. Stuck in a DRS train, it was probably a relief when the pit wall told him to retire the car on lap 40 to 'save engine mileage'.
Daniel Ricciardo (Power unit, lap 46): 7/10
Returning to the scene of his surprise victory in last year's Italian GP, Daniel Ricciardo celebrated by finishing first practice in tenth well ahead of his McLaren team mate. While Lando Norris picked up the pace in the afternoon to move ahead, Ricciardo was still a decent P11 and went on to have one of his best qualifying performances in recent times, which translated to an all-McLaren second row for the race when the various grid penalties were sorted out. Ricciardo himself started from fourth and immediately got ahead of the struggling Norris when the lights went out. There was no shame in being picked off by Max Verstappen a few moments later - everyone was outdone by the Red Bull on Sunday, after all. He fought off Norris and Pierre Gasly until his pit stop dropped him down the order, leaving him labouring to pass Kevin Magnussen and Valtteri Bottas. By the time things settled down he was in P8 behind Norris, exactly where he had qualified and probably an accurate indicator of McLaren's performance this weekend. Unfortunately a mechanical failure with seven laps to go put paid to his hopes of what would have been well-deserved points this weekend.
