Sergio Perez (P2, 18 pts): 8.5/10
Sergio Perez had a great start to the weekend, topping the first practice session by a whopping 0.438s over Charles Leclerc and a full six tenths quicker than his own team mate Max Verstappen who was struggling to find his rhythm this weekend. Perez stayed in the top three for the remaining sessions and duly qualified on the front row alongside Verstappen, who was now just 0.138s quicker. It's about the quickest we've seen Perez get up to speed at a Grand Prix weekend compared with his dominant colleague. Unfortunately a sluggish start on Sunday put him on the back foot, allowing Leclerc to wrest second place away going into the first corner. Perez ran a longer first stint than the others and stayed on soft tyres at the first pit stop when Leclerc changed to the hard compound, and that let him reclaim P2 on lap 26. And that was pretty much it for the night, especially when Leclerc suffered a technical retirement leaving Perez almost half a minute clear of Fernando Alonso. if anything, it's that margin rather than Verstappen's outright victory that should cause their rivals the most alarm after the first race of the season.
Max Verstappen (P1, 25 pts): 9.5/10
We don't like handing out ten out of ten ratings like sweets here at F1i, let alone two in one weekend, but we came very close to doing exactly that this week. When it came to the race, Max Verstappen's Bahrain GP was about as perfect as it got. He aced the start and quickly pulled away from the rest of the field now headed up by Charles Leclerc after the Ferrari got around Sergio Perez in the first corner. Despite some downshifting issues (which seem to have been cured by the age old "turn it off and turn it on again" approach of cycling through engine modes) it was pretty effortless for Verstappen after that as he managed his tyre degradation and still had pace to spare to stretch out an 11s lead by the time the chequered flag flew. But despite all this, we're going to be mean and shave off half a point on the grounds that our ratings cover the whole weekend, not just the race, and Verstappen admitted to having problems finding his rhythm back in the cockpit on Friday and Saturday morning, and it wasn't until Q3 that he finally managed to put things together and top the timesheets for the first time. After that - perfection.
