Round 5: Miami
F1i's driver of the weekend: Max Verstappen (Red Bull) - 9.5/10
Max Verstappen shrugged off a disappointing qualifying to storm his way back to the front of the field despite a long first stint on hard tyres, to clinch victory over Red Bull team mate Sergio Perez and to top our ratings. Fernando Alonso resumed his now-traditional run of third place finishes for Aston Martin for the second highest rating of 9.0 ahead of Perez on 8.5 and Russell as one of four drivers tied on 8.0.
"If we were giving a rating for race day alone there would be no question that Verstappen would score ten out of ten," we explained the following day. "It was a remarkable performance from the reigning champion, who carved his way through the field to take the lead of the race with no great apparent effort, dispatching one top-rated driver after another with clinical - one may even say contemptuous - ease.
"There was little doubt from very early on that starting from ninth place on the grid wasn't going to stop him from claiming an emphatic victory. But our ratings cover the whole weekend, and we have to knock off half a point for that slip-up in the final round of qualifying: aborting his initial run left him without a time, and then leaving it until the end of the session to make a second attempt made him vulnerable to an ill-timed red flag, which is exactly what happened.
"Even so there was never any great sense of panic about what Verstappen could do on Sunday, he just got on and did it. Magnificently."
Round 6: Monaco
F1i's driver of the weekend: Esteban Ocon (Alpine) - 9.5/10
Verstappen claimed his fourth win of the year with a "very lovely" victory in Monaco in which rain struck midway through, while Aston Martin threw away their best chance of victory so far this season by opting to switch Fernando Alonso to new slicks rather than inters. Alonso was just able to hold on to second from his former Alpine team mate Esteban Ocon who tied in the ratings with Verstappen on 9.5, but we're doing to break the tie in the Frenchman's favour.
"It's been a very long time since Esteban Ocon scored his one and only F1 race victory, in Hungary in 2021, so his celebrations on the podium in Monaco on Sunday were entirely understandable and thoroughly deserved," we reported.
"He'd had a solid time in practice, finishing in the lower regions of the top ten in all three sessions, but exceeded expectations in the final round of qualifying were he managed to push his way up to fourth. That became third on the grid when Charles Leclerc was handed a grid penalty for blocking lando Norris giving Ocon a great view as the top two - Max Verstappen and Fernando Alonso - roaring off into the distance as soon as the lights went out, never to be seen again.
"The Alpine just didn't have the sort of pace and performance to match Red Bull and Aston Martin, so Ocon had to focus on repelling unwanted advances from Carlos Sainz. The stand-off ended up with damage to the Ferrari's front wing endplate from one probing attack too many. Ocon and Sainz subsequently pitted within one lap of each other in order to guard against an early stop from Lewis Hamilton, which dropped Ocon behind George Russell; when Russell did stop for inters after the rain started to fall, it was only thanks to the Mercedes sliding off at Massenet and hitting Sergio Perez in an unsafe return that Ocon's podium was finally secured, once he deterred Hamilton from any costly late lunges.
"It's fair to say that the result flattered the Alpine - and that it was Ocon who personally deserves the lion's share of the credit for it."
