How the tables have turned. Only two weeks ago Max Verstappen was licking his wounds after being trounced by Charles Leclerc; this weekend he was almost flawless to put his Ferrari rival to the sword at the Scuderia’s home race.
The Dutchman was peerless in all three competitive sessions, but he wasn’t the only one who struck form in the heavily mixed conditions. They say rain is a great equaliser, and in the wet we saw some old favourites fire up as well as a rising star shine brightly enough to blind his iconic teammate.
The race may not have been a classic, but there were several superb performances to be admired regardless.
Note that each driver’s starting position for the grand prix is based on where they finished in the sprint.
1. MAX VERSTAPPEN (qualified first, started first, finished first)
Max Verstappen had such an excellent weekend in Imola that there’s almost nothing to say about it. His grand slam performance — pole, every lap led and fastest lap of the race — was supplemented by his victory in the sprint race (or top qualifier position, depending on how you want to look at it), and the sum of the weekend was to make it all look easy, even 2021-like. If you wanted to be particularly cruel, his one moment of weakness was his slow getaway in the sprint, but his better tyre usage got him back past Charles Leclerc anyway. Absolutely dominant.
2. GEORGE RUSSELL (qualified 11th, started 11th, finished fourth)
George Russell is among several standout candidates for top positions in these rankings, but the way he had Lewis Hamilton covered all weekend has him pip the rest. He toyed with the idea that three years in a problematic Williams car is giving him the capacity to drive around Mercedes’s problems while Hamilton suffers with the shell shock of it all, but his opportunism early in the race ensured he maximised his substandard machinery, even if he got a little lucky finish as high as he did through attrition. He’s now the only driver in the field to finish no lower than fifth at every race, a position his car increasingly appears to have no place belonging.
3. VALTTERI BOTTAS (qualified eighth, started seventh, finished fifth)
In his quieter moments Valtteri Bottas must be laughing to have left Mercedes at seemingly the opportune moment — he’d be ahead of Hamilton in the standings were it not for his technical retirement in Saudi Arabia. Alfa Romeo was a little off the headline midfield pace, but in qualifying, the sprint and the race he managed to squeeze the most from it, and had it not been for a significant delay at his pit stop — a cross-threaded wheel nut kept him stationary for around 10 seconds — he probably would’ve finished ahead of Russell and on the Norris’s gearbox in contention for an unlikely podium.
4. LANDO NORRIS (qualified third, started fifth, finished third)
McLaren’s comeback — to the midfield at least, let’s not get ahead of ourselves — seems to be coming along nicely, and Lando Norris is delivering almost flawlessly. A crash at the end of qualifying, causing a red flag, was his only false note, but it ultimately cost him nothing and he started the sprint and excellent third. McLaren didn’t have the tyre life on Saturday, similar to Ferrari, but Norris adapted on Sunday with the benefit of clear air at the top of the midfield to bring the car home a relatively lonely third after Leclerc’s crash.
5. ALEX ALBON (qualified 20th, started 18th, finished 11th)
In 2021 Williams would make strategy gambles in forlorn hope they’d deliver points; this year the car is just competitive enough to make that a decent likelihood, and Alex Albon came less than five seconds from another point. The team gambled on a low-drag set-up on Friday despite the risk in wet conditions, and that ultimately aided the Thai driver in defending against faster cars after he’d jumped them as the fourth driver to risk the switch to slicks in another bold move. He feels increasingly like the perfect Russell replacement, able to push the boundaries of the car when his teammate is struggling.
6. YUKI TSUNODA (qualified 16th, started 12th, finished seventh)
The Japanese sophomore had a small edge over teammate Pierre Gasly all weekend, albeit aided substantially by the Frenchman’s crash with Zhou Guanyu in the sprint. It exaggerated the differences between them by Sunday, Tsunoda he was also one of the few drivers to execute any genuine overtaking on Sunday, getting two passes done late in the race. This time last year Yuki suffered the first big crash of his F1 career here to kick off a barren run — it’s pleasing to see him mature as a driver, which was key to keeping on top of the difficult mixed conditions of the entire Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix weekend.
7. SEBASTIAN VETTEL (qualified ninth, started 13th, finished eighth)
Sebastian Vettel made the difference for Aston Martin this weekend. In the dry sprint he couldn’t hold back the tide of faster midfield cars, but in the wet in qualifying and the race he was at his experienced best. He was one of the three early adopters of slick tyres after Daniel Ricciardo’s first stop, and he drove excellently in tricky damp conditions despite his car clearly still being the handful it was in Australia. Considering teammate Lance Stroll is ordinarily pretty quick in the wet, Vettel’s Imola form was probably even better than his classification suggests.
8. SERGIO PEREZ (qualified seventh, started third, finished second)
This was by no means a bad weekend for Sergio Perez, but on a weekend his teammate was almost flawless — and a weekend that featured so many other top-shelf drivers — his error-prone Emilia-Romagna drops him down the rankings. He was scrappy in qualifying on his way to seventh, which meant the sprint was spent in recovery rather than harassing Leclerc. His defence in the grand prix was typically solid, but he was lucky not to be made to pay for a trip over the grass at around half distance that almost undid his good work.
11. ESTEBAN OCON (qualified 19th, started 16th, finished 14th)
His race really ended with qualifying on Friday, when a gearbox problem prevented him from competing. He made limited progress for the rest of the weekend — albeit few cars could did much more given the difficulty overtaking — but we also never really looked like he had Alonso pace when they were both on track, leaving him marginally behind his teammate.
12. LANCE STROLL (qualified 15th, started 15th, finished 10th)
An average weekend for Stroll that could’ve been better had he strung together a clean lap in Q2 to make it into the shootout. His racing was good enough on Saturday and Sunday, but he lacked compared to Vettel in conditions he’s normally been quite good in.
13. PIERRE GASLY (qualified 17th, started 17th, finished 12th)
Perhaps a little unfair on the Frenchman given his weekend was undone largely by a crash with Zhou, but he was outqualified by his teammate in the damp and beaten around the pit stops in the grand prix. By his usually electric standards it was an off weekend.
14. CHARLES LECLERC (qualified second, started second, finished sixth)
He made only one mistake, but it was a big one in the dying stages of the race when third was nailed on — and considering Tsunoda crashed at that corner last year to devastating effect, really he was lucky it wasn’t substantially worse. He and Ferrari can’t be blamed for going aggressive for a higher podium place, but by his own admission he was too greedy and spoiled an otherwise solid weekend by not knowing his limits.
15. CARLOS SAINZ (qualified 10th, started fourth, did not finish)
Another needless crash for Carlos Sainz, this time in qualifying. He was lucky the rain arrived to keep him from falling lower than 10th, from where he was able to recover in the sprint — but had he started in position, he may well have helped Leclerc win the 100-kilometre race or beaten Verstappen to victory himself. His first-lap crash on Sunday clearly wasn’t his fault, but it all amounted to another weekend to forget for the Spaniard.
16. LEWIS HAMILTON (qualified 13th, started 14th, finished 13th)
With the exception of Daniel Ricciardo, who suffered a first-lap crash, and Zhou Guanyu, who started from the pit lane, no driver finished as far behind his teammate this weekend as Lewis Hamilton, who was nine places and a lap adrift of George Russell. There were plenty of mitigating factors, including getting baulked off the line and being shoved by Ocon in the pit lane, but the bottom line is that he was outperformed at every turn by his junior teammate and took home his worst finish on pure pace in 13 years. In this car in these conditions, Hamilton had no answers.
He couldn’t get onto Bottas’s pace in qualifying, and from 14th on the grid he got caught up in a crash with Gasly that the stewards fairly deemed a racing incident — though he could’ve given a little more space. He was solid enough recovering from the subsequent pit lane start after repairs, but clearly there was much untapped potential in his car.
18. DANIEL RICCIARDO (qualified sixth, started sixth, finished 18th)
It’s frustrating to have Daniel Ricciardo ranked so lowly when on pace he appears to have closed the gap to Norris from last year, even though he couldn’t quite manage to get his lap together in qualifying. His crash with Sainz was deemed a racing incident, but it was clearly his fault, and the damage to his car cost him any semblance of a decent result in quick-enough car.
19. NICHOLAS LATIFI (qualified 18th, started 19th, finished 16th)
The Canadian didn’t feel at home in his car in the same way Albon did, with conditions and the slipperier set-up costing him confidence. He at least managed to get the car home when other drivers struggled, but it was another difficult weekend all around on which he was shown up by his teammate.
20. MICK SCHUMACHER (qualified 12th, started 10th, finished 17th)
What a pity. Points were on the table for Mick Schumacher after a patient sprint helped him recover from an underwhelming qualifying, at least by teammate Magnussen’s standards, but he squandered it with several spins, including one that destroyed Alonso’s car despite relatively light contact, to walk away with nothing. He just couldn’t perform in tricky conditions, and at this stage the rookie excuse won’t get him over the line.
