Driver ranking after the Las Vegas GP
Great victory for Russell driven by a strong Mercedes; a cerebral Verstappen won his fourth F1 championship
Sin City leaves us with another weekend full of adrenaline and records in the Formula 1 like the coronation of Max Verstappen as champion for the fourth consecutive time, the first victory from a pole for George Russell, the comeback of Lewis Hamilton and the strategic blundering on the part of Ferrari.
To put together this driver classifier, we took everything done over the weekend, prioritizing the practice sessions, qualifying and the race. We also consider the car each driver competes with, as well as the competitor’s years of experience.
1. Max Verstappen
The champion leads the ranking for doing what was necessary to seal his fourth title in a row, staying ahead of Lando Norris in an RB20 that in theory should not have had a good weekend in the Nevada desert, but somehow, Max was left with fifth position and at times he was seen fighting for the podium with Carlos Sainz and Ferrari, if we needed more proof of the Dutchman’s greatness as a driver after the current season, we must review ourselves.
2. George Russell
Weekend of total dominance by Mercedes and Russell who knew how to manage the temperature of his tires both in qualifying and in the race, winning his second GP of the season in front of a grid that still does not understand where the pace shown by the arrows came from silver in Las Vegas.
3. Lewis Hamilton
A miscalculation at the exit of Turn 2 during Q3 took Hamilton out of the fight for pole, but the pace that the seven-time champion showed on Sunday makes it clear that when the car has pace, Hamilton takes the “ hammer time” and if the race had a greater number of laps we could have seen a good fight for the victory of both teammates.
4. Nico Hulkenberg
The best of the rest, Hulk continues to lead a Haas team that has already become accustomed to scoring points, taking advantage of Alpine’s bad Sunday to take P6 in the constructors’ table and better yet, consolidate the German in P10 of the drivers’ championship with five points ahead of Yuki Tsunoda.
5. Yuki Tsunoda
In a weekend that began with problems at the airport for the VCarb driver, Tsunoda does what is necessary to stay in the conversation about a possible change to Checo Pérez’s seat with a solid performance in which he beat his teammate Liam Lawson and to Pérez himself in Sunday’s race.
6. Carlos Sainz
Ferrari’s leader during the weekend, the Spaniard was undoubtedly the best driver of the team who, despite the serious error in the stop strategy, managed to surpass Verstappen to take third place on the podium, beyond the fights. internally with Leclerc, Sainz was strong from Friday to Sunday.
7. Charles Leclerc
Leclerc could have fought for the podium if he did not ruin the tires of his first stint trying to chase Russell, from then on the race went to “damage control” for the Monegasque who saw Sainz and Verstappen pass in front of him thanks to graining which affected almost the entire grid, still, P4 in a weekend where Ferrari simply was not on par with Mercedes, is not a bad result.
8. Guanyu Zhou
The Chinese put his Sauber in Q2 on the circuit that no one expected such performance and was ahead of drivers with a better package such as Colapinto, Lawson and Esteban Ocon, beating Valtteri Bottas again, a solid effort by Zhou who says goodbye to the category as full-time driver after the Abu Dhabi GP.
9. Checo Pérez
The Mexican recovered 5 positions and gave us a double pass on Liam Lawson and Kevin Magnussen that must be considered the best of the season. Checo added the last available point of the race by overtaking Fernando Alonso for P10.
10. Fernando Alonso
Despite adding his race card in a row without finishing in the points zone, Alonso had a decent weekend considering that the Aston Martin seems to be the slowest car on the grid. Like Checo, Alonso starts from P16 and got into the points until the last part of the race where he fell due to a surgical overtake by the Mexican.
