Grand Prix Rejects

1. Alex Albon/Williams. Dangerous and ultimately silly.

2. Fernando Alonso. This geniuenly felt like the first weekend ever where you could argue Alonso's age was a factor against him. The guy's damn near superhuman but Old Father Time still remains undefeated.

1. the 600% chance of a safety car
2. the 800% chance of rain
3. Oscar Piastri

100% Safety Car - Do I really need to explain further.

Perez - The slow arse Perez of old is BACK.

1. Williams pit stop. Not putting the hard tyre on properly for Albon was pure reject material. Truly wrecked Albons race.

2. 100% chance of the safety car statistic. Turned out we had no safety cars at all. Stupid prediction.

(1) the guaranteed safety car - there was not even a yellow flag IIRC?

(2) Crofty's replacement - not a single over-stretched pun or commentator team in joke

(3) Fernando Alonso - that was not great

Fernando Alonso: In his illustrious career, this is one of the very worst races he's had. Crashed in FP3, slowest time in qualifying (only saved from last place by Sargeant's time being taken away) and 19th and last finisher in the race – his shared worst classification in a race (he was also 19th in Mexico 2022, but even this was after a late retirement). One of the few weekends when he was clearly outperformed by Stroll.

1) 100% safety car: LOL.

2) Sergio Perez: Back to disappointing.

Dishonourable Mention: Fernando Alonso - terrible qualifying, trundled around the back, making up the numbers this weekend.

Alonso, Checo are big DHMs but the 100% safety car is the comedy gold one for me.

As others have said, Alonso had an unusually poor weekend this time around - he never really looked comfortable in the car from the start and was unusually error prone, even going as far as complaining that his poor performance in qualifying was because the corner markers on the outside of the corner at Turn 1 were missing (they'd been taken out during the Formula 2 event that preceded qualifying). As others have noted, for all the criticism that Stroll gets, this was one of those rare weekends where he looked far better than Alonso did.

With Albon, it was a bit of a sloppy mistake by Williams to let him go, although there is perhaps a slight mitigation that the error with the wheel nut not being fully tightened was not immediately obvious. I'd say that should be more of a criticism of Williams rather than Albon, as he was running reasonably competitively in the race until that error.

As for Perez - I have seen some people comment that Perez also had a rather noticeably slump in form last year when they got to this point in the calendar, and it seems that we're seeing a repeat of that decline in form again. Whilst he might have gotten away with it in the past, with Ferrari and McLaren closing up in pace, and with Mercedes and Aston Martin not that far off either, those slumps in form are much more expensive for him.

For now, Red Bull are kind of getting away with it thanks to Verstappen winning so many races and with Ferrari and McLaren tending to split 2nd through to 5th between themselves, so the gap in both championships is still opening up. However, if McLaren or Ferrari get to a point where their drivers can start to take a few more victories away from Verstappen, and if Perez has an extended run of poor form, the WCC might start getting a bit tighter than it has been.

Having finally caught up on the race I’m going for:

Alonso: One of the worst weekends of his entire career nearly 20 years after his legendary duels with Schumacher at this very circuit

Perez: The Post-Azerbaijan Perez of last year is back and with McLaren and Ferrari much stronger than last year he may been seen even more than 2023

Williams Pit Stop: Just the latest in a ridiculously long line of adventures happening at Williams this year

Safety Car Stat: Pure commentator’s curse stuff there