Yuki Tsunoda (P12): 6/10
Yuki Tsunoda has been much improved this season since he became de facto team leader at AlphaTauri in the wake of Pierre Gasly's departure for Alpine, but he still has a worrying tendency to lose perspective and make costly errors. Such was the case in Barcelona: he was distinctly average on Friday but still had hopes of making the top ten in qualifying only for things to get very messy in Q2 which saw him spin, go off and run through the gravel after flirting with track limits more than was good for him and saw his best lap time cancelled. As a result of this he ended up 15th on the grid behind his team mate Nyck de Vries, and he knew that a tough race lay ahead of him as the AT04's strength was in single lap speed rather than whole race pace. Actually it was going very well for him on Sunday - making up three places on the opening lap, then having a strong second stint on the hard tyres to climb up to climb up to eighth place - and he was looking set for points running in ninth for the final run to the flag. Unfortunately he got locked into a spat with Zhou Guanyu which ended up with Zhou getting forced off the track, and the stewards handed Tsunoda a five second penalty that meant he dropped behind Zhou, Pierre Gasly and Charles Leclerc in the final classification - and moreover, out of the points. He was not a happy man.
Charles Leclerc (P11): 5/10
What on earth happened to Charles Leclerc's Ferrari this weekend? The team arrived in Barcelona with its new-look sidepods, optimistic that they would prove effective at a conventional track like the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. While there wasn't a remarkable improvement in the SF023 it was reasonably consistent in practice with both Leclerc and Carlos Sainz safely tucked inside the top ten. There was no warning what would happen in qualifying when suddenly Leclerc was struggling for any sort of pace at all. When it was finally confirmed that he had been unable to find the speed to make the cut at the end of Q1, jaws dropped up and down pit lane. Sainz had no such problems and went on to put his car onto the front row, so what was it with Leclerc's? The engineers couldn't find the problem, and instead replaced the backend of the car overnight (a pit lane start wasn't much of a setback at this point) and the result was ... Well, to be honest, exactly the same wretched state. Credit to Leclerc for plugging away, and he did seem to find some pace in the second half of the race, but it wasn't enough to match the likes of Alpine, AlphaTauri or even Alfa Romeo. This wasn't just embarrassing, it was disastrous for Ferrari's self-image. There will be a lot of frowns and people scratching their heads at Maranello this week, prodding the car and seeking solutions in time to travel to Canada. This cannot be allowed to happen again.
