Feature

F1i's Driver Ratings for the 2024 Saudi Arabian GP

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Pierre Gasly (Gearbox, Lap 1): 6/10
Obviously there's not much we can say about Pierre Gasly's race, as he suffered a gearbox issue on the formation lap and crawled back to pit lane soon after the start. Not his fault, but it leaves us with little to go on when it comes to the ratings. However there were some some faint signs of an Alpine recovery before that, with Gasly in the top ten at the end of Thursday practice, and P12 in FP3. He wasn't last in qualifying (talk about damning with faint praise) and was less than a second and a half behind Max Verstappen's best time in Q1. There's no question that Alpine are still in dire straits, but at least there are some early signs that they're working on it.

Lance Stroll (Accident, Lap 7): 4/10
Glanced the wall in practice and then more emphatically in the race itself to put him into the barrier to bring out an early safety car, outclassed by his team mate in qualifying, this was not a good weekend for Lance Stroll. He's been in F1 long enough now not to be making these sorts of amateur errors, but as we've commented before it seems he topped out his potential several seasons ago and this is as good as he's going to get. Which to be honest is simply not good enough for a team like Aston Martin if they have serious aspirations to challenge the likes of McLaren and Mercedes for podiums, wins and future championships.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.