Lando Norris (P6, 8 pts): 8.5/10
We're not entirely sure quite how Lando Norris managed to charge his way to sixth place on Sunday. McLaren really hadn't been looking in the mix all weekend, with Norris ninth in FP1 and 12th in FP3. When it came to qualifying it looked like he had missed the cut at the end of Q2, only to be handed a reprieve when Zhou Guanyu's late flier was deleted for exceeding track limits. All that meant Norris finished the session in eighth, which after penalties were applied was converted to P6 on the grid. He lost place after place on the opening laps and dropped to 14th as a result of his initial pit stop, and then suffered an even slower stop on lap 35 that left him down in 15th place. Game over, right? No one told Lando that, and he raced like he had an afterburner fitted to the back of the MCL36 as he carved his way past car after car. Particularly satisfying was his late strike on Fernando Alonso with two laps to go. A remarkable performance which shows the car (and its latest upgrades) is really so much better than Daniel Ricciardo makes it look.
George Russell (Fastest Lap, P5, 11 pts): 7.5/10
The good news is that Mr Consistency is back, with George Russell adding to his remarkably tally of top five places in 2022 that has helped him settle in to fourth place in the drivers championship with three race remaining. The bad news is that he won't be happy with how he did it this week, with the lowest moment coming at the first corner of the race when he ended up running into the side of Carlos Sainz and puncturing the Ferrari's radiator. He got a penalty for that, and had no complaints about the decision. The five second delay to his pit stop as a consequence dropped him to ninth, but the two safety cars helped him navigate his was back to fifth place, just one position lower than he had started. There was little he could do about catching the cars ahead of him and so he settled into auto-pilot mode for the rest of the race; by the end he had enough space around him to make an extra pit stop for soft tyres to scoop the bonus point for fastest lap. Not bad; but if not for that self-inflicted penalty, he would have been in the running to join his Mercedes team mate Lewis Hamilton on the podium.
