Valtteri Bottas (P12): 7.5/10
Having been in the doldrums in recent races, Alfa Romeo was looking distinctly happier in Hungary. Valtteri Bottas was in the top ten in all three practice sessions, and that promise was made good in qualifying where both he and team mate Zhou Guanyu made it into the final top ten pole shootout. Bottas started immediately behind Zhou on the grid, but managed to avoid hitting him when the Chinese driver failed to get away from the grid in timely fashion. Having to manoeuvre around him meant Bottas lost five spots into the opening corners, while Zhou was left sparking a multi-car accident behind. Despite starting on the medium compound Bottas made an early pit stop on lap 9 to move onto the hard tyres for the remainder of the race. Unfortunately the strategy left him struggling to stay within sight of the top ten after finding himself struck behind Alex Albons in the Williams for much of the afternoon. A disappointing outcome for the Finn on the day, but he was taking comfort in clear improvements since the latest upgrades were introduced to the C43: "We unlocked something more from our package on Saturday, so definitely the potential was there and we will aim to build on that ... We just clearly lacked rhythm in the race."
Alexander Albon (P11): 7/10
Alex Albon (and lately his Williams team mate Logan Sargeant) have become known for some great performances in Saturday's qualifying session, but the new Alternative Tyre Allocation system did not work in their favour. Neither driver did well when forced to use hard tyres in Q1 this weekend, leaving both of them missing the cut albeit by just one hundredths of a second in Albon's case. Even before that, it hadn't exactly been looking promising for them: the FW45 had already looked slightly under the weather throughout Friday and Saturday morning, with Albon a consistent 13th across all three practice sessions. Starting the race from P16 on medium tyres, Albon made an unexpectedly early stop on lap 8 in pursuit of finding some clear air, but the cars that had started on softs then pitted on the next lap leaving him stuck in traffic again. He was up to 11th by the time he stopped a second time on lap 31 for another set of the hard tyres, and once the rest of the pit stop cycle had been completed he found himself back in P11 running behind Lance Stroll and ahead of Valtteri Bottas in a DRS train. He had his work cut out to stay ahead of the Alfa Romeo but managed to pull it off, and even though he was one place off the points he was happy with the unexpectedly good result at a circuit the team had never really expected to do well at.
