Pierre Gasly (P18, Accident damage, Lap 47): 7.5/10
Pierre Gasly made steady progress up the order through the three practice sessions (P13, P8, P4) and had little trouble making his way through to the final round of qualifying, but then hit a glass ceiling and seemed to lose his way with the changing tyre conditions in Q3 where he just couldn't find the pace to beat anyone else in the round. Describing tenth on the grid as a disappointment and not up to his own expectations, it still gave him a solid platform for Sunday where he immediately passed Alex Albon when the lights went out at the start of the race. He fell in behind Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton for the first 18 laps but had to give way to the superior pace of the Red Bull when the recovering Sergio Perez came calling. He was unfortunate to pit just before Kevin Magnussen's retirement trigged a virtual and actual safety car which meant he lost out when others got their 'free' stop. He was 11th at the restart on lap 39 and was drawn into a long-running duel with Aston Martin's Lance Stroll which lasted until lap 44. Gasly won the battle but lost the war, sustaining damage from a collision (for which Stroll was penalised) that sent him to pit lane to retire the car as part of a double DNF for Alpine.
Nyck de Vries (P17): 4.5/10
There's a heavy sense of inevitability about Nyck de Vries, who could have as little as two races left to run in his budding F1 career. This weekend will have done little to make a counter-case for AlphaTauri keeping him, but it's not all his fault - nominal team leader Yuki Tsunoda fared no better this weekend. The truth is that the squad appears adrift in the middle of the ocean, stuck in the doldrums while the squad's owners work out what to do with Red Bull's annoying kid brother. De Vries was 11th in FP1 and FP3 but was slowest of the 19 runners in second practice; when it came to qualifying, he ended up back on the back row, although he got a subsequent boost to P18 when Valtteri Bottas was excluded from the results for a fuel infringement. Starting on softs, he got ahead of Zhou Guanyu at the start and remained ahead of the Alfa Romeo through the first round of pit stops until the safety car for Kevin Magnussen's retirement. He opted to make a second stop to return to the soft tyres but the time and track position it cost meant that by the end of the race he was running dead last following Pierre Gasly's departure from the field of battle. That's not a good look on anyone's report card, to be honest.
