Up Next
Whether it was Red Bull's "miracle" mid-weekend transformation, the chaos that unfolded in the Qatar Grand Prix itself (and race control's part in it), or news of a shock driver-team split at the end of it, the penultimate round of the 2024 Formula 1 season ended up being one of its most lively.
But who maximised their result, who might've done but for small (but costly) imperfections, and who's reached their lowest ebb in F1?
Here's the verdict from Ben Anderson - subbing in for Edd Straw this weekend - on who performed best (and worst) across the whole weekend.
How do the rankings work? The 20 drivers will be ranked in order of performance from best to worst on each grand prix weekend. This will be based on the full range of criteria, ranging from pace and racecraft to consistency and whether they made key mistakes. How close each driver got to delivering on the maximum performance potential of the car will be an essential consideration.
It’s important to note both that this reflects performance across the entire weekend, cognisant of the fact that qualifying is effectively ‘lap 0’ of the race and key to laying the foundations to the race, and that it is not a ranking of the all-round qualities of each driver. It’s simply about how they performed on a given weekend. Therefore, the ranking will fluctuate significantly from weekend to weekend.
And with each of the 10 cars fundamentally having different performance potential and ‘luck’ (ie factors outside of a driver’s control) contributing to the way the weekend plays out, this ranking will also differ significantly from the overall results.
Started: 2nd Finished: 1st
Struggled in the sprint, but as soon as Red Bull figured out the suspension and how to run the car low enough, Verstappen came alive.
He was superb in grand prix qualifying and used the injustice he felt at being penalised out of pole to make a point in the race.
He was decisive at the start, precise when defending from Lando Norris, almost perfect at the various restarts, and had the awareness to point out Norris's yellow flag transgression - which ensured the biggest threat to Verstappen's victory was neutralised.
Verdict: At his imperious and uncompromising best.
Started: 1st Finished: 4th
Russell belonged to a select group that could actually give Verstappen something to think about this weekend - and the other guy in that group got himself stupidly penalised out of a podium finish.
The Mercedes driver self-flagellated for a poor start, but not finishing on the podium was simply down to bad pitwork from the team and awful performance on the hard compound.
Verstappen clearly doesn't like the way Russell behaves in the stewards' room, but there's so much to admire about what Russell is doing on-track right now. To be hauling Mercedes so consistently into pole/victory/podium contention - and so thoroughly scrambling Lewis Hamilton's compass in the process - is a massive feather in Russell's cap.
Verdict: Result didn't reflect how well he drove.
Started: 5th Finished: 2nd
There's no doubt Leclerc maximised Ferrari's result on a track that doesn't really suit the car's preference for short corners, bumps and punchy acceleration zones.
Want to quiz Ben on his rankings?
This week, Ben will be taking questions via The Race Members' Club on Patreon, which he'll respond to with an exclusive video.
Head to our Patreon page to get involved! And comment on this post.
He made the most of Ferrari's only new floor to qualify within a tenth of both McLarens and although he drove a fairly contained race, the lack of errors meant he was there to capitalise as others tripped up.
Pulled a tasty pass on Hamilton in the sprint, raced Oscar Piastri's McLaren hard, and kept Ferrari's constructors' championship hopes alive by stealthily creeping up the classification in the grand prix.
Verdict: Finished second in the fourth-best car.
Started: 11th Finished: 5th
We've become used to seeing Gasly qualifying the Alpine somehow well inside the top 10 so it was almost strange to see him miss out on Q3.
Apart from that slightly underwhelming performance, and a tough start to the race, there's not much to criticise.
He grew as a force as the race wore on, and his round the outside pass on Sainz after the final restart, having run wide trying to overtake Russell, was brilliantly opportunistic.
Gasly hasn't driven consistently this well since 2021, I'd argue.
Verdict: Maximised Alpine's result in a difficult race.
Started: 12th Finished: 8th
I honestly think Zhou Guanyu has been one of the worst-performing drivers, if not the worst-performing driver, through most of 2024, and after the Americas triple-header he looked out of his depth almost. Team-mate Valtteri Bottas had been absolutely smashing him to pieces.
But there were new signs of life in Vegas after Sauber's full overhaul of the car's floor, and suddenly Zhou has found some badly needed confidence.
To have two tenths on Bottas in qualifying and then carefully pick his way through that chaos to score Sauber's first points of the season - well, I didn't see that coming!
Verdict: By miles his best performance of 2024.
Started: 3rd Finished: 10th
I'm putting Norris at the top of the group of drivers who didn’t maximise the result on offer, but otherwise performed superbly. I'm no fan of how he finished the sprint - but he performed imperiously in that race.
I don't think the front-limited McLaren was ever going to contend for pole as the grip ramped up for the grand prix, but Norris was the only one able to properly threaten Verstappen’s race pace.
Had Norris not stupidly "f***ed it up", as he put it, by not backing off for yellow flags on the straight, he'd be contending for a top-three place in these rankings.
Verdict: Undid himself with needless rule-breaking.
Started: 8th Finished: 7th
The Aston Martin has been pretty awful recently, but here - with its Budapest-spec higher-speeds-suited floor fitted - the car was in a better place and Alonso went with it.
Qualifying top of the midfield runners (and scalping Sergio Perez's Red Bull) was an overachievement; and finishing a few seconds behind Gasly's Alpine and Sainz's Ferrari was probably not far off the best Aston could've hoped for, helped by an excellent call to switch back to medium Pirellis under the safety car.
The only blight really is the extra work he gave himself by losing all those places after the first safety car restart. Alonso felt the car was "confused" but the team wasn't absolutely convinced the machinery was to blame there, so it remains a question mark - but the only one really.
Verdict: Probably his best weekend since Singapore.
Started: 4th Finished: 3rd
A decent result from a respectable weekend's work. Piastri raced hard with Russell and Leclerc (he was unlucky to finish behind the Ferrari really) and helped limit the damage of Norris's penalty in McLaren's constructors' championship quest.
The main thing with Piastri is that he just looked that crucial bit off Norris's level here. Piastri couldn't quite extract the same pace from the McLaren all weekend, and the driving looked untidy too. If there was a McLaren running wide and kicking up gravel dust, it was inevitably Piastri's.
It feels like that front limitation in the McLaren is just holding Piastri back a touch more than his team-mate.
Verdict: A decent effort but not quite on top of the car.
Started: 7th Finished: 6th
Sainz looked like he was missing a couple of tenths to Leclerc around this track, but most of that deficit can be attributed to the new floor that Ferrari introduced only on Leclerc's car for this race. Taking account of this, Sainz was about as close to Leclerc on raw pace as Piastri was to Norris.
Without that poorly-timed puncture and pitstop it's likely Sainz would have finished ahead of Russell. Given the circumstances, sixth was about the best result Sainz could have hoped for - except for not managing to keep Gasly behind after that final restart.
Verdict: A solid weekend in a less-than-perfect car.
Started: 10th Finished: 9th
Benchmarking against team-mate Nico Hulkenberg is difficult here because of how Hulkenberg's grand prix was effectively constrained by the deployment problem that forced him out in Q1. Magnussen put a top-10 car inside the top 10, but the fact he went slower in Q3 than in Q2 suggests some performance was left on the table.
His race was a bit of a battle (but he loves those!) and he probably shouldn't have ended behind a Sauber, but an early pitstop killed his chances of finishing ahead or with Gasly.
But anyway, given how many of the drivers who are clearing out at the end of 2024 are limping towards the end, it's refreshing to see Magnussen so fired up and on form over these final races.
Verdict: An effective and combative performance.
Started: 14th Finished: 13th
After a difficult sprint, Tsunoda forced his RB into the top 10 with a commendably strong opening lap. He raced hard, but it looked as though he'd put the car artificially high up and it simply regressed as the race wore on.
The RB has never been great at high speed and low ride, despite several updates, and so Tsunoda effectively won the four-way battle with the Williams drivers to not be at the very back this weekend.
Verdict: Flattered the car with early top 10 cameo.
Started: 18th Finished: DNF
Quite difficult to judge Hulkenberg's weekend, given his qualifying was ruined by an energy deployment problem that dumped him out in Q1. That defined his grand prix too, because he was then wiped out by Esteban Ocon's out-of-control Alpine at Turn 1.
There was a lot of chat about Hulkenberg causing that incident because he lost the rear momentarily in that corner, but he looked more in control of his car than Ocon was! But certainly no one else was to blame for beaching his Haas in the gravel under the safety car...
Honestly, he's only this high up because he was good in the sprint and I suspect his underlying performance was probably stronger than Magnussen's.
Verdict: Underlying pace but unable to recover from Q1 bad luck.
Started: 13th Finished: 11th
Normally, Bottas finishing 11th in that car would represent one of his better weekends of 2024, but here he was completely overshadowed by a team-mate he has otherwise been destroying - and there has to be an element of Bottas underperforming for that to be the case.
You have to question his tyre management in the race too, given he stopped 11 laps before his team-mate did. Although smashing into that Williams wing mirror did at least help Zhou gain a free pitstop!
Verdict: Not at his best, on a weekend where the Sauber was.
Started: 16th Finished: 15th
The Williams just doesn't like this track. Too much wind sensitivity, not enough downforce, and too much understeer made for a tough weekend all around, and Albon wasn't able to overcome the limitations.
He cost himself a Q2 place with a snap of oversteer at the final corner and was a bit untidy in the race too - clashing with Lance Stroll's Aston on the first lap (not really his fault) and then later copping a penalty for forcing Magnussen off the road (definitely his fault).
Verdict: Couldn't make the difference as Williams struggled.
Started: 17th Finished: 14th
Lawson’s first stint with RB/AlphaTauri ended with this grand prix and I remember he was unhappy with how it ended. This year wasn't much better really, save for a strong performance in sprint qualifying.
But of the drivers who weren't the best performers in their teams this weekend, Lawson's underlying pace was pretty close to his team-mate's - well within a tenth, so comfortably in the Piastri/Sainz range comparatively. The trouble is, both his races were messy.
Verdict: Respectable pace in a bad car, but messy race execution.
Started: 19th Finished: DNF
You can make a case for putting any of the remaining five drivers top or bottom of this final segment, which basically includes all those who had really quite awful weekends for different reasons.
I'm giving Colapinto the nod for 16th because he qualified closer than any of these others to his team-mate, a gap that might have been less had he not spent day one using outdated front suspension (admittedly his own fault for crashing so much previously).
Nothing to go on in the race because he got wiped out by Ocon at Turn 1.
Verdict: First sign his stunning cameo is petering out.
Started: 9th Finished: DNF
I have to put Perez behind Colapinto simply for that woeful pitlane start in the sprint race, for which Perez received a dressing down from Red Bull management.
That seemed to wake him up, because this was thereafter comfortably his best performance since probably Baku in mid-September while still being somehow massively underwhelming.
He qualified a huge nine tenths off Verstappen, couldn't run with the other leading cars - save for keeping a well-below-par Hamilton behind - then needlessly looped his Red Bull under the safety car and burnt out the clutch trying to restart, all of which cost Perez a probable top-five finish.
Verdict: Just looks like a lost cause now.
Started: 6th Finished: 12th
It’s difficult to think of a Hamilton race as messy or deeply underwhelming as this one was.
He described the qualifying gap to Russell as unprecedented in his F1 career, but was matching his team-mate in Q2 before overdoing things in Q3 and ending up four tenths adrift.
Hamilton's grand prix was just a litany of mistakes and misfortune: he jumped the start, got stuck behind Perez, punctured his overly-worn medium tyres on debris, got penalised for speeding in the pits, fell to the back and then simply couldn't recover as the Mercedes rooted its front tyres.
Hearing his radio plea to park the car was the most un-Lewis Hamilton thing ever.
Verdict: So bad that he actually wanted to retire a healthy car.
Started: 15th Finished: DNF
Stroll has looked like a driver simply waiting for the Aston Martin to become remotely competitive again, so it was disappointing to see him not really make anything of the opportunity this race presented in the way his team-mate did.
Didn't do a good enough job preparing the tyres in Q2 and ended up a massive seven tenths off Alonso. Stroll's race was obviously defined by that first-lap clash with Albon's Williams, which Stroll felt broke something more substantial than a tyre and so decided to park it after serving a penalty for causing that collision.
Verdict: Nowhere near the top 10 on a scoring weekend for Aston.
Started: 20th Finished: DNF
This probably has to go down as Ocon's lowest moment in F1 - lower than getting binned by Racing Point for Lance Stroll, and lower probably than colliding with Gasly in Monaco this year.
That feels like the catalyst for all that's followed - a team that wants rid of the driver; a driver who has increasingly felt marginalised, even actively compromised by that team.
He had no qualifying pace, clattered himself out of the grand prix straight away, and then got booted out of the team with one race still to go.
Verdict: A terrible way for his Alpine/Renault stint to end.
