Daniel Ricciardo (P14): 5.5/10
Daniel Ricciardo was Las Vegas' biggest fan coming into the weekend, and his huge smile was more than a match to all those brilliant lights down the Strip. But he struggled to shine on the track itself, starting the weekend in P19 in second practice and then slowest of all in FP3. He did make the first cut in qualifying to pick up P14 on the grid, but then he lost a couple of stops at the start getting through the various messy incidents ahead of him. The restarts were little help and after that he was struggling to find any rhythm. He made the most of the situation on the medium compound to move up to 12th, but a switch to a set of used hard tyres for a very long second stint doomed him to the lower orders for the rest of the afternoon. "It was particularly slippery," he explained later. "It was humiliating, and that shows how much we lacked grip."
Kevin Magnussen (P13): 6.5/10
Kevin Magnussen was a long way off the pace of his Haas team mate Nico Hulkenberg in both practice sessions, but both cars made it through to the second round of qualifying - and then Magnussen went one better, making the final cut to get into Q3 where he picked eighth on the grid, five places better than Hulkenberg. He went into the race hoping the cooler night time conditions would help Haas in its continuing battle with tyre degradation and graining, but after a solid start he followed his usual trajectory of decline. His first pit stop to exchange mediums for hard saw him in 14th place; he then used the second safety car as a 'free' opportunity to upgrade to a fresh set, which gave him extended life and later allowed him to pass Logan Sargeant and Zhou Guanyu when their tyres hit 'end of life' in the final laps. For once, tyre degradation had worked to Haas' favour!
