The back tracking after all that righteous indignation was hilarious.

If they're just using a bland placeholder name until they find a new title sponsor, they should have just changed it back to Toro Rosso, surely. Reminds me of AM's Racing Point phase.

He didn't phone it in, he never does. He went into this weekend knowing two things:

1. the Ferrari was likely to be faster over one lap due to the circuit's mixture of long straights, big braking zones and slow corners suiting their car (see Monza).
2. the Red Bull usually has the best pace on race day regardless of its qualifying performance.

Gone are the days where Max has had to regularly risk crashing his car in quali to start as high up the grid as possible - he knows that as long as he has a strong qualifying and a clean start, he can almost always move forward in the race. His banker lap in Q3 was excellent and proved good enough to keep hold of P3 even as other drivers improved.

The only weekend this year where Max has really treated qualifying like life or death was at Monaco where your qualifying position is crucial because overtaking is almost impossible.

He's on course to break a couple of records that will withstand cynicism much easier than this one.

As Max alluded to in his post race interview, the enforced pitstops nullified the RB19's usual advantage of being kind on tyres.

I'm convinced that at least some of this is from all the hours he puts into competitive sim racing - he reckons he's learned a lot from watching the best sim racers and that some of it translates to F1.

I always found his slightly dour nature quite endearing but I have to say he was not very inspiring in his recent Beyond the Grid interview when asked to explain Alpine's present and future ambitions.

I think you're trying extra hard to be generous but it's undeserved. Checo is a good driver but he seems to need near-optimal conditions to qualify well - the right circuit, the right track conditions, the right weather. The problem is that you're often not afforded that much stability on a race weekend and the last few races have demonstrated his inability to adapt. Until he finds a way to handle difficult conditions he's gonna continue to get creamed by Max.

As for him doing a good job - he's not even achieving the bare minimum, which should be a podium every weekend at the very least. The only reason why his performances haven't caused major concern at Red Bull yet is because the pace of the RB19 means that Max doesn't need a wing man this season.

Wouldn't be a wise choice for Charles unless he is very confident that he can be faster than Max on average - it would be a better bet to stay at a big team that is fully behind him. I think this is why Lando turned down Red Bull repeatedly.

Also don't think this is a good choice for Red Bull - they need a Hamilton-Bottas lineup and not Hamilton-Rosberg lineup. It's too risky unless you have the best car by a large margin, and with the cost cap and aero restrictions Red Bull can't be absolutely sure that their car will have this much of a clear advantage in the next two seasons.

Hmm if that's true he would have been seriously ragging the car around on the limit, which I can't believe RB would risk in a test session. Sounds like RB are leaking tall tales to the press to mount pressure on a certain driver.

As ruthless as Red Bull can be, I didn't think this would actually happen. AT doesn't seem to be enough of a priority for RB anymore to get this panicky about poor driver performance. Maybe this is less about Nyck underperforming at AT and more about freeing up a seat to start auditioning replacements for Perez.

Tsunoda has Honda backing him, which quite literally bought him more time.