Vettel still can't be told. He's just more low-key about it these days, but it still costs him.
Heroes and Zeroes:
Haas - this is what they came for! There was no way that Haas could have bettered their result. Grosjean maximised his great qualifying position, Magnussen was persistent and everybody kept things reliable. Well done
Verstappen - it's not often I have Max in the better part of the table, but today is such a day. When I tell the most extreme anti-Verstappen crowd that he just might be salvageable, this is the sort of race I use as evidence. Granted, he had little chance to practise race-protection moves, but when he drove as fast as he did, the other tools in his armoury were quite sufficient, thank you very much.
Mark Voewels - yes, he got the strategy call wrong. As it transpired, it might have been salvageable had it not been for the car starting to fail on Lewis (some days I think that machine is emphathic and fighting impending car failure probably got Lewis' tyres toasted prematurely), because most soft tyres wilted under pressure from challengers. What gets him into this list is not hypothetical, however - it's the frank and heartfelt apology over the radio. It's rare to hear anyone apologising meaningfully for anything in the moment nowadays, especially from the pitwall. For someone who doesn't even normally get a microphone to do so is heartening. In a sport full of computers, someone gave us a very human monent - and hope that Mercedes will sort out their over-reliance on algorithms for strategy.
Honourable mentions:
Alonso for scrambling into points (multiple) despite being well away from the scoring table as late as lap 53.
The Twitter chief at Mercedes-Benz for handling the torrent of post-race abuse with aplomb, openness and good solid ethics.
Zeroes:
The people who inexplicably thought Mercedes' PR chief personally administered Hamilton's strategy, and called the chief every name under the sun: There are 1300 people at Mercedes. The person actually to blame apologised over the radio and probably would have deployed the logical Plan B had Lewis' car been capable of it. The team doesn't have a TARDIS to reverse that call and the FIA would ban it if they possessed one. Heaping personal abuse is already bad, doing so to the wrong person is worse, but doing it after the actual responsible person did what little was possible about it really shows the worst of F1 fandom
Hamilton: Mercedes got the message the first time. No need to be holding a grudge against them half an hour later on the same thing. Especially glaring when one would have thought the fact the car was falling over would be a more pressing source of ire.
Whoever thought it was a good idea to put a cheap CGI star over the track: If you're going to do it, at least make it look vaguely realistic. The 1980s called, they want their failed special effect back.
Dishonourable zeroes:
Sainz's car. It sounds like it had every non-race-ending problem under the sun.
Hartley's engine. You were new and meant to last 6 races, and your driver's fighting for his career...
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