Ahead of today’s qualifying for the Portuguese Grand Prix, we look back at the last race and how the TJ13 readers rated the race along with their driver of the weekend.

Rate The Race and Driver of The weekend – Race 2, Emillia Romagnia GP, Imola, Italy 2021

Mean Reader Score: 8.42 Ranked 1 out of 2 so far this season.

This being only the second race at Imola since the 2006 San Marino GP predated this website’s reader poll, we only have last year’s race to compare the marks to. Scoring 8.42 this is higher than last year’s mark of 7.16.

The battle between Hamilton for this year’s WDC continued. This time it was Verstappen who got his elbows out at the start and pushed Hamilton off track to take the lead from P3, relegating Hamilton to P2 and Perez to P3. Not without drama, this race had, a lot of  yellow flags, one red flag, one black and white flag, innumerable blue flags and of course the chequered flag.

Hamilton and Verstappen now have one win and one second place apiece, but Hamilton is in the lead in the WDC by virtue of winning an extra point this week for the fastest lap. Lando Norris took the final podium place AND the F1 driver of the day, as after the restart he showed he too had sharp elbows and nabbed P2 from Leclerc within seconds, but sadly the Mercedes of Hamilton proved too much for his rather tired soft tyres and he couldn’t quite hang on to second place.

He also asserted his dominance within Mclaren by ‘suggesting’ he was being held up by the dirty air of his teammate (i.e. get him out of my way).  Mazepin went for his obligatory spin, (to be fair, so did many others) as the weather was tricky, being too wet for slicks but not quite wet enough for full wet tyres.

Driver of the Weekend: Lando Norris, 52.2 % of reader vote.

Not surprisingly, after his stellar performance, Lando Norris won our Driver of the Weekend accolade as well (as the F1 Driver of The Day).  

Having set the fastest time in Q2 after the first round of flying laps, and clocking the second fastest lap in Q3(which sadly was deleted) we really shouldn’t have been surprised by Norris appearing on the podium this weekend. (He also put in the second fastest time in FP3)

Overtaking Gasly after the first restart and Leclerc after the second, and having asserted his P1 status by getting the team to tell Ricciardo to let him past, driving a spectacular race and finishing on the podium, my guess is this will not be the only time Lando wins our Driver of the Weekend accolade. Well done Lando!!

@F1TheaJ