Collisions, penalties, more Formula 1 constructors’ championship swings and a driver’s five-year relationship with a team suddenly ending early after a first-corner shunt - the Qatar Grand Prix was pretty eventful.
Here’s our pick of its big winners and losers.
LOSER: ESTEBAN OCON
Esteban Ocon had little room to manoeuvre when a fully committed Nico Hulkenberg got Turn 1 on lap one all wrong, causing an incident between them and Franco Colapinto.
Really, you could take the glass half-empty approach and ask why Ocon was at the back of the grid and an incredible nine tenths of a second off team-mate Pierre Gasly in an almost identical Alpine, but Ocon has offered little in the way of explanation. His team thinks the car is fine, and he clearly feels something is wrong.
And - most painfully - this non-event will likely be Ocon and Alpine’s last race together.
There were good times, like his win in Hungary in 2021 which was absolutely remarkable, and even his second place in Brazil two races ago.
But that feels more like two decades ago as Ocon has clearly not been happy with the car in the dry in recent races and has been shown up by Gasly - who’ll now have a new team-mate next weekend. - Jack Benyon
WINNER: SAUBER AND ZHOU
Only Lando Norris’s late charge back through the order stopped a double-points finish for Sauber, but there was some justice in Zhou Guanyu being the one to score Sauber’s first four points of the year.
He’s the driver who has suffered most from the team’s troubles this season and his F1 racing career looks over while Valtteri Bottas might yet get a reprieve even if it’s not until 2026.
Zhou had started 12th and a host of drivers struggling ahead meant his race didn’t need to be perfect. But he was still able to make overtakes and the car looked like it belonged in F1, not F2 - which hasn’t always felt like the case this year.
Bottas fought up to 10th with a tough battle versus Alex Albon, but it’s typical of his year that it didn’t matter and Norris stormed past meaning Bottas might finish the year 23rd in what should be a 20-car championship.
But there are signs of life at Sauber and today is a time to celebrate that. - JB
LOSER: MCLAREN
This should have been a second and a third in the race and the constructors’ championship being all but tied up, not just from the grid positions but from the early pass on George Russell by Lando Norris and with Carlos Sainz getting a puncture.
But Oscar Piastri couldn’t get back past Charles Leclerc for second after losing out with safety car and pitstop timing, and Norris made the mistake of attacking Max Verstappen around the outside - how well has that worked for you this year, Lando? - and then didn’t slow under yellows, earning a 10-second stop and go penalty.
There’s 21 points to play with the manufacturers’ battle, but this was supposed to be a ‘McLaren’ track, and instead it was outscored by its rival. - JB
WINNER: MAX VERSTAPPEN
He was clearly motivated by being dropped a position from pole to second in qualifying for driving unnecessarily slowly and impeding Russell.
In fact, it felt like through the sheer force of will and being slighted that Max Verstappen would just sweep that place back and he immediately did at the start.
He did come under pressure from Norris and shoved him wide pretty harshly at Turn 1, but the stewards didn’t deem it a problem and he didn’t put a foot wrong on the way to a 63rd win.
It was an incredible turnaround from a team that was eight-tenths down in the sprint qualifying and a ‘miracle’ turned its ‘rally car’ into the top challenger.
Long live the unpredictability of F1 in 2024. - JB
LOSER: MERCEDES
It was a woeful race for Lewis Hamilton and only taking fourth from a race he started on pole was no good for Russell.
Hamilton jumped the start, for which he was penalised, had a puncture, and then appeared to forget to put on the pitlane speed limiter, getting a penalty for that, and then wanted to park his car and end the pain.
It’s somewhat ironic the only reason he couldn’t give up straight away was because he would have had to have carried a penalty into the Abu Dhabi weekend.
Russell lost first and second in the first handful of corners and never really looked like getting those positions back. A slow first pitstop put him way back and he was furious to be pitted for a second set of hard tyres rather than a softer compound. A late penalty for failing to maintain distance behind the safety car was another blow but ultimately didn't cost him in the order.
Just a week after that amazing Las Vegas 1-2 neither the team nor its drivers executed the race well and no doubt the season can’t end quick enough for everybody at Mercedes. - JB
WINNER: PIERRE GASLY
Fifth place on a miserable weekend for his Alpine team-mate Ocon. Pierre Gasly pretty much carried Alpine this weekend by surging from 11th to fifth.
There was some fortune in the form of (suspected) punctures for others, sure, but Gasly was the best midfielder by a long shot and he proved that with a great move on Yuki Tsunoda and a decent one on Kevin Magnussen - both of them driving for Alpine’s key constructors’ championship position rivals.
Gasly also shrugged off a request to lift and coast - something that is baffling given the safety cars and VSC should have helped Alpine save fuel - to beat Sainz to fifth.
Given how Alpine started the season, it should be thrilled with how it’s finishing, and Gasly should be too. - Samarth Kanal
LOSER: SERGIO PEREZ
Lapping almost a second slower than your team-mate in the first stint of a race is no way to make a case for yourself.
Sergio Perez just couldn’t get to grips with the Red Bull and then he lost grip, as he said his engine surged and sent him spinning out in Qatar.
Red Bull is now out of the constructors’ championship title hunt and it’s been another weekend with just one car in the game.
It might not have been Perez’s fault but he wasn’t troubling McLaren nor Ferrari today. With Verstappen putting in another brilliant performance, the contrast between Red Bull’s drivers appears as stark as ever. - SK
WINNER: FERRARI
You’d need the world’s biggest pendulum to show Ferrari swinging between winner and loser in this race, but ultimately it gets the nod because it outscored constructors’ championship rival McLaren when it could have been properly beaten.
It was Norris’s 10-second stop and go penalty that was the icing on the cake as it prevented McLaren from having both cars finish ahead of the Ferraris, even before Sainz’s puncture forced him to mount a comeback.
Leclerc getting ahead of Piastri was another boost, and even Norris’s fightback to 10th and fastest lap couldn’t halt the Prancing Horse stealing a march.
21 points is a big deficit but it’s still a chance, when entering the race it looked like McLaren might sew the constructors’ up. - JB
LOSER: WILLIAMS
What a dire few weeks for Franco Colapinto. A string of crashes meant he entered Qatar on a different specification to Alex Albon and then he could only qualify 19th.
And then another crash today. This one wasn’t Colapinto’s fault - it was a chain reaction caused when Hulkenberg had a snap of oversteer into Turn 1. Forgivable, really, but an incident that now causes even more of a headache for Williams as it scrambles for spares and puts the team under more pressure.
Albon was also punished for banging wheels with Kevin Magnussen and finished last - another point-less weekend for a team that finds itself in no man’s land at the end of the season. - SK
WINNER: FERNANDO ALONSO
If you noticed Fernando Alonso in the first half of the Qatar GP, it was because he was being overtaken, going off the track or moaning on team radio.
Then at the end of it, he emerges with a thoroughly decent seventh place.
Pace-wise, this wasn’t too bad a weekend for Aston Martin - even though as Alonso admitted, that only means being on par with Alpine and Haas now when it started the year with much loftier goals.
But with another fifth place in the constructors’ championship secure barring a miracle from Alpine in Abu Dhabi, some flashes of pace (from Alonso) and a first point finish for the team since Singapore in September is a little bit of late-season encouragement. - Matt Beer
LOSER: RB
The RB wasn’t great this weekend, the late-race gamble on soft tyres really didn’t pay off and there was a bit of bad luck too that all left Yuki Tsunoda and Liam Lawson 13th and 13th.
But as Red Bull desperately wonders who it can replace Perez with now he’s blown its hopes of defending its constructors’ title, watching Perez’s most likely replacements take RB from sixth to eighth in the standings has got to be a grim experience. - MB
