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Really? I wasn't sure about Ricciardo, considering how few races he did although Mexico City and Hungary were both very good drives.
Yuki Tsunoda had a disappointing spell alongside Liam Lawson but generally held the upper hand over Ricciardo, which I found impressive, and comfortably beat Nyck de Vries, and had a series of very nice drives with Abu Dhabi the best overall.
Nico Hulkenberg always went backwards in races but that seemed to be because of the Haas car. In qualifying, he put in some properly brilliant laps like Spain and Austria and he was considerably better than Kevin Magnussen who has had a decent career. I thought it was a great comeback for him.
Valtteri Bottas didn't have the best of seasons and his racecraft is still letting him down, but in the second half of the year, he always outperformed Zhou, had some nice races like Bahrain and Qatar and a lot of good qualifying laps, and didn't make any mistakes of note.
Sergio Perez, on the other hand, rarely qualified near the top despite having the best car at every track bar Singapore, through total lack of pace, or mistakes, then his recovery drives were very rarely enough to get back to second, which is where you would expect him to be, and he was involved in so many silly incidents all season that cost him so many points. I thought it was by far the worst season of his predominantly very good career. Mercedes Bottas or Ferrari Barrichello would have been able to qualify and finish second to Verstappen most of the time, I feel, with this level of dominant car, but Perez did that almost never.
In time, I think Oscar Piastri will surely become better than Ocon or Gasly and Alpine will still regret letting him go, but this year I thought he was pretty much dominated by Lando Norris most of the time.
And I agree that Charles Leclerc had a very disappointing season but I would still say he held the edge over Sainz most of the time. It was a lot closer than I expected.
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