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Singapore Grand Prix winner Lando Norris was absolutely untouchable from final practice onwards.
But was he the top performer of the latest Formula 1 weekend? Not according to Edd Straw's driver rankings...
How the rankings work
The 20 drivers are ranked in order of performance from best to worst on each grand prix weekend. This is 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 is 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: 2nd
It’s weekends like this, when a driver extracts the maximum from the available machinery to take the best-possible results both in qualifying and the race, that championships are made of.
Yes, Max Verstappen was assisted by Ferrari’s Q3 problems, but he delivered a well-put-together lap when it mattered, and then didn’t put a foot wrong on his way to second place.
Verdict: Perfect damage limitation.
Started: 7th Finished: 8th
Fernando Alonso was at his hustling best on the Singapore streets, just as he was in Baku, delivering a superb qualifying performance in a car that without his skills would surely have been knocked out in Q2.
He converted that into ‘victory’ in the midfield battle thanks to a well-executed race, jumping Nico Hulkenberg with an undercut, then staying clear of the Haas in the second stint.
Verdict: Couldn’t have done more.
Started: 1st Finished: 1st
Norris was outstanding from the off in Singapore, but even with qualifying proving tougher than expected, he was still on pole position by two tenths of a second.
He consolidated his position with a good start and had pace in reserve and his winning margin of 21 seconds could easily have been bigger.
So why is he not ranked first? He would have been but for his mistake when he locked up at Turn 16 and so nearly crashed, which is too big an error to be shrugged off entirely even though the brush with the wall he had in the second stint can be more easily dismissed.
Verdict: In control all weekend.
Started: 6th Finished: 9th
Hulkenberg was justifiably disappointed with Haas’s race strategy. After heading the ‘Class B’ pack in qualifying, he was always destined to slip behind the Ferraris but that wasn’t the case with Alonso.
Haas handed a four-lap undercut to Alonso, which turned what would have been eighth into ninth for Hulkenberg on a weekend where he drove superbly and outclassed his team-mate Kevin Magnussen.
Verdict: Back on top form.
Started: 4th Finished: 4th
Singapore is, historically speaking, not George Russell’s best track, but on his fourth appearance, he finally got a car to the chequered flag there.
He couldn’t have done better in the race and managed to keep the charging Charles Leclerc at bay, although turning the tables on Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton after being shaded in qualifying by 0.026s was the consequence of his team-mate’s problematic strategy.
Verdict: Quietly effective.
Started: 3rd Finished: 6th
The decision to start on softs in the hope of attacking the front-row starters backfired, although that wasn’t the only factor in Hamilton sliding from third in the opening stint to sixth and 85 seconds down at the finish.
His pitstop could have been deferred but was made on lap 17 of 62 in the mistaken belief the Mercedes would be, relatively speaking, quicker on the hard tyres.
It wasn’t. And after being overcut by Russell, Hamilton was then inevitably passed by Oscar Piastri and Leclerc, who had huge tyre-life offsets, in the second stint.
This was also a weekend in which he felt the car came alive “for the first time in a long time in qualifying”, even though he felt there was a little time left on the table.
Verdict: Strategy backfired on Sunday.
Started: 9th Finished: 5th
Leclerc was quick, but his weekend turned on Ferrari’s misjudgement in Q3.
A tyre bluff successfully got him advantageous track position in the hunt for the best of the conditions, but it left him with front tyre temperatures that had dropped too low.
He couldn’t get them into the right window, didn’t have the front grip he needed at the start of his lap, set a slow time as a result that was deleted for track limits anyway and saw his podium hopes evaporate.
Eighth in the first stint, he ran long and passed Alonso, Carlos Sainz and Hamilton to salvage fifth.
Verdict: Fast but unfortunate.
Started: 15th Finished: 13th
Given the Alpine was the ninth-best car in Singapore, making it to Q2, finishing 13th running an orthodox medium/hard strategy and outpacing his team-mate Pierre Gasly meant Esteban Ocon ticked all the boxes available to the modest machinery beneath him.
He finished behind cars he couldn’t have beaten and ahead of all those he could, which is all you can ask from him.
Verdict: Maximised limited machinery.
Started: 12th Finished: 11th
Despite not having the Williams front suspension upgrade, Franco Colapinto was bang on team-mate Alex Albon’s pace and only seven-thousandths slower in a qualifying session in which neither felt the car was at its best.
That said, Colapinto wasn't happy with his lap, which he felt contained too many errors.
Though criticised by Sainz and Albon, his move at the start was spectacular as he got the car into the corner and rotated despite a small lock-up at Turn 1, then shook out ninth after a brief snap at Turn 2 cost momentum.
He lost a place to Sainz’s long undercut but had Williams not let Sergio Perez stop a lap earlier, Colapinto likely would have taken the final point ahead of the Red Bull.
Verdict: Further enhanced his reputation.
Started: 5th Finished: 3rd
Unlike his McLaren team-mate Norris, this wasn’t a weekend on which things came so naturally but Piastri was in decent shape come qualifying.
But a moment at the exit of Turn 16 cost time and, more importantly, spiked the rear tyre temperatures and led to him slipping to 0.428s behind Norris by the end of the lap.
Running long in the first stint to get a tyre offset was a good move, allowing him to pick off the Mercedes drivers to take third.
Verdict: Not at Norris’s level.
Started: 8th Finished: 12th
Yuki Tsunoda excelled in qualifying by taking eighth despite being tight on time meaning his outlap and tyre preparation was compromised, but sliding to 11th with a mediocre start meant he was always on the backfoot.
He effectively held position, only losing one more place to Sainz’s 20-lap undercut, finishing 2.5s behind Colapinto and well clear of the stragglers group headed by Ocon.
Verdict: Poor start proved costly.
Started: 11th Finished: DNF
Albon looked a threat to lead the midfield, but with the Williams proving a little sensitive found the car doing some unexpected things in Q2 and had a “messy” lap as a result.
A good start meant he briefly nosed into ninth, but on the outside line, he ran out of space and took to the run-off, dropping to 15th.
After an early stop, he was behind Sainz when he retired with an engine overheating problem.
Verdict: Early promise faded away.
Started: 20th Finished: 15th
Qualifying didn’t go well, Zhou Guanyu ending up half-a-second behind Sauber team-mate Valtteri Bottas and complaining of “no speed and grip” on his Q1 lap, on which “I could’ve been in the wall three, four times”.
The race went much better, Zhou seizing on Bottas’s mistake to pass his team-mate then staying ahead.
He even played the team game by backing off to give Bottas the tow at times, although the Sauber didn’t have the pace to have finished any higher than he did.
Verdict: An accomplished race drive.
Started: 19th Finished: 16th
His qualifying performance was a good one, it’s just that the Sauber is now so hopeless that even a lap on which only hundredths are left on the table leaves you behind an underachieving Alpine driver.
Brake troubles manifested themselves early on and a lock-up at Turn 5 on lap six led to him running wide, with Zhou passing him on the long run to the next turn.
Bottas ran behind Zhou to the end, benefitting from his team-mate hanging back to give him the tow, finishing ahead only of Gasly and Daniel Ricciardo.
Verdict: A difficult weekend.
Started: 18th Finished: 17th
Gasly was second-best of the two Alpine drivers, struggling for grip and falling in Q1 after lapping three-and-half-tenths slower than Ocon.
However, the doomed strategy - running long after starting on mediums then taking softs - exaggerated the gap in the race and left him ahead only of Ricciardo.
Verdict: A futile weekend.
Started: 13th Finished: 10th
As the Red Bull improved, so Perez struggled more. However, he did feel he could have qualified a lot better but for being baffled by the lack of grip in Q2 that led to his elimination.
The die was cast by that Q2 disaster and he didn’t make much progress in the race, running 10th early on, losing a place to Sainz’s long undercut but jumping Colapinto with an undercut of his own.
Verdict: Stuck after Q2 disaster.
Started: 10th Finished: 7th
This was one of those weekends where circumstances made it difficult for Sainz to show what he could have been capable of.
Brake troubles on Friday, his crash at the final corner when starting his Q3 lap, slipping to 12th at the start after getting boxed in then taking an early pitstop in a bid to make gains.
That allowed him to rise to seventh, but there wasn’t much more he could do.
Verdict: Q3 crash demolishes his ranking.
Started: 17th Finished: 14th
Just as Alonso repeated his Baku heroics, Singapore was a recapitulation of the previous weekend for his Aston Martin team-mate Lance Stroll in terms of his unsuccessful search for a consistent balance.
On the positive side, the qualifying deficit to Alonso was four tenths, rather than a second, and there was no first-lap collision, but he couldn’t make much progress down the order, beating only Saubers and the strategically disadvantaged.
Verdict: Low in confidence in tricky car.
Started: 16th Finished: 18th
The weekend started positively for Ricciardo but then came the Saturday downturn.
That was made worse by the growing rumours that this might be his final grand prix, and if it is his swansong it wasn’t a good one.
Little progress was made on softs at the start so he took an early pitstop, which firmly set his race on the road to nowhere.
Two further stops, the last to take fresh softs and deny Norris fastest lap, meant he was firmly last.
Verdict: Friday promise turned to dust.
Started: 14th Finished: 19th
The half-second deficit to Haas team-mate Hulkenberg in qualifying couldn’t be explained by Magnussen being on the older front wing specification, but he was puzzled by not picking up time in Q2 despite what he felt was a good lap.
He ran an alternate strategy after starting on the hards, but picked up a puncture when he kissed the Turn 5 wall, while running 14th.
That forced another pitstop then an end to the futility when he brought the car in with four laps remaining.
Verdict: A patchy weekend.
