Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing (P6, 8 pts): 7.5/10
Red Bull bounded into 2024 understandably confident of another sweep to the championship. Max Verstappen duly won seven of the first ten races of the season. the last of those was in Spain in June. But s since then Verstappen has been runner-up twice but otherwise not even on the podium. We know things can change quickly in Formula 1, but this is enough high G Force whiplash to send us straight to the medical centre for evaluation. We had expected Red Bull to swiftly find a way to snap out of it, but warning lights started to flash at Zandvoort and this week's tepid display (by Red Bull's own elevated standards) means the alarms are now going off as well. In the past, the team has been able to rely on Max Verstappen to paper over any cracks in car performance, but in Monza the deficit was too much even for Max. He looked - and we can't believe we're saying this - thoroughly ordinary this week.
Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes (P5, 10 pts): 8/10
Lewis Hamilton was kicking himself after qualifying where he finished in sixth place, saying that the team deserved better from him after he had topped FP2 the day before and again in final practice on Saturday morning. In hindsight it was probably the best that the Mercedes could do this weekend. He basically finished exactly where he had started, right behind Carlos Sainz, with a single place improvement down to George Russell's messy run-off at the first corner of the race. Realistically the W15 didn't have the raw pace of the two McLarens, and didn't have the ability to run the one stop strategy that benefitted Ferrari. Hamilton did nothing wrong and did what he could with the tools at hand, but tyre degradation was once again Mercedes' Achilles heel. It meant he was 22s behind race winner Charles Leclerc - not the outcome they had been looking for.
