All this nonsense about drivers.....who is best and who is not....it's a pointless discussion and the comments in this section are sometimes just fanboy nonsense. Russel did very well but his performance in the Merc so far is as expected as it is by far the best car on the grid, nothing new or unexpected in that regard. I still find him overrated as a driver, not saying he isn't very good, just saying he is not exceptional (I still do not see it). The Merc was fastest in a single lap last week, so it is fastest in a single lap this week. However I did expect Bottas to be on top of him, but apparently his mental state is worse than I thought...2021 will undoubtedly be his last year in a Merc.
F1 after the turbo age of the eighties is 1 TEAMSPORT like no other sport, a driver cant even start his car without a 20 person team to do so; comparing drivers of different teams is therefore pretty pointless, they can only be compared against teammates and even that is disputable (because of the intra team hierarchy, look at Schumacher, Hamilton, Alonso, Senna to name a few who were CLEARLY favoured within their teams). Drivers are just one person of a (in for example Merc's case) 1200 member team, it's silly to state they are the ones who are the decisive factor and what makes a car fast. Drivers especially in the current hybrid era are such a very small component, in race mode they just "run the program" as everything is being calculated in advance and managed in real time at the factory in a control room that literally dwarfes NASA's Houston Control of the Apollo Moon landing project... Energy deployment, tyre management, fuel management...all is managed and controlled in real time, all drivers have to do is execute the program.
In the end the main thing that sets a driver apart from the rest is consistency (making the least errors in a race and let the car perform near to 100% over a race distance), leadership and risk analysis (shown in racecraft), all the rest is purely down to the car. Taking this into consideration in 2020 there are two drivers that stand head and shoulders above the rest of the field based on these three factors and those two are Verstappen and Hamilton, fanboy or hater, no discussion about that because those two are (among the drivers) the two top alpha males in the paddock, and are mentally the strongest and fittest. Both have the ability to drive the car closest to 100% (consistency), take control over the decision making during race (leadership) and know when to take a risk or not (risk analysis). Leclerc, Ricciardo and Perez also have shown this in 2020 but are behind on the leadership component as displayed by VER & HAM imo.
