It has been a long, long time since Max Verstappen was in the driver rankings of Motorsport-Magazin.com was not among the ten best drivers of a Formula 1 weekend. But it happened in Monaco. Of all people, an old rival knocked him out. The Red Bull driver had nothing to do with the decision to win.
Unsurprisingly, Charles Leclerc can celebrate one last time this weekend. In the MSM rankings, it is already his second win of the season. Despite a less than perfect qualifying round, Oscar Piastri also put up a tough fight in terms of the marks. Both received three Very Good from the editors and landed in the first two places with 1.16 and 1.23.
Verstappen misses top 10 in driver ranking for the first time since 2022
What’s next at the top of the rankings? Alex Albon wrests the last place on the ranking podium from Yuki Tsunoda in the second decimal place of the reader rating, both finish with an overall score of 1.69. Lando Norris is already well behind in fifth place with 2.09. However, the search for the World Championship and ranking leader is in vain.
For the first time since he beat Lewis Hamilton in Brazil in 2022 and disregarded a team order, Max Verstappen is not among the top ten drivers in the MSM ranking. His offense in Monaco is much less serious, he only cost himself a better starting position with a driving error on the last qualifying lap. With an overall average of 2.96, his series of races under a three-point average, which has continued since Abu Dhabi 2022, is at least still intact.
But not his top 10 series. The hurdle to entry was Lewis Hamilton with an average of 2.75. Verstappen lost to him both with the editors (2.67 to 3) and with the readers (2.84 to 2.92), leaving him only eleventh place. It should be noted that Nico Hülkenberg would have finished behind both world champions if it were up to the MSM readers. Thanks to two twos from the editors, he managed to grab ninth place.
Crash pilots Ocon and Magnussen slapped
A driver forgot the most important rule of motorsport in Monaco. Don’t have an accident with your teammate. Esteban Ocon hadn’t internalized this when he almost pushed Pierre Gasly into the wall on the first lap at Portier. For this he was first penalized with a retirement, then with 5 penalty places for Canada, and finally with last place and an average of 5.11 in the ranking.
Ocon is the 14th driver to break the five-point average in the ranking system introduced in 2019. Times are tough here in 2024: In just eight races, four individual performances have already been rated 5 or worse. This means that the year is on track to beat the negative record of 8 set in 2020.
At least – Kevin Magnussen narrowly avoided his second 5th place in Monaco after the crash at the start. With 4.97. Sergio Perez, who came third from last with 4.86, can at least boast of not having knocked out a teammate. To achieve that, he would have had to be 10 places further up the grid…
Where are the cushions? Race in Monaco a total failure
The crash at the start was the worst possible scenario for this year’s Monaco GP. With no rain on the horizon, the leaders simply put on hard tires and drove through. Half of the readers and all three MSM editors rated a race in which the drivers were about to fall asleep with 5 or 6. Nevertheless, the other half of the readers gave it 1 to 4. The combination of Monaco glamour and somewhat unorthodox strategy excitement did have something to it.
- Readers’ rating race: 4.27
- MSM-Note Race: 5
- Overall race score: 4.64
Driver ranking Monaco 2024: The MSM grades
| P. | driver | Menath | Niedermaier | Stonecracker |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Leclerc | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 2 | Piastri | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 3 | Sainz | 3 | 3 | 2 |
| 4 | Norris | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| 5 | Russell | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| 6 | Verstappen | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| 7 | Hamilton | 3 | 3 | 2 |
| 8th | Tsunoda | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 9 | Albon | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 10 | Gasly | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| 11 | Alonso | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| 12 | Ricciardo | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| 13 | Bottas | 4 | 3 | 2 |
| 14 | Stroll | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| 15 | Sargeant | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| 16 | Zhou | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| 17 | Ocon | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| 18 | Perez | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| 19 | Hulkenberg | 2 | 2 | 3 |
| 20 | Magnussen | 4 | 5 | 5 |
| … | … | … | … | … |
| Run | 5 | 5 | 5 |
F1 driver ranking Monaco 2024: Hard cases of the editorial team
Christian Menath
Positive hardship case: Charles Leclerc
Negative hardship case: Zhou Guanyu
Monaco is a difficult race, because you only really evaluate the qualifying. But it is clear that Charles Leclerc has to win this ranking. He was there from FP1, made no mistakes all weekend, drove cleverly and took risks when it mattered – and did so under immense pressure. I had a hard time evaluating Max Verstappen: Was the Red Bull really so bad that sixth place was the maximum? I don’t think so, the mistake in qualifying cost him at least one place. I am disappointed by Zhou Guanyu. The Chinese is fighting for his future, but is showing far too little and is making mistakes like he did in training. I’m clearly missing the improvement from him in his third season.
Florian Niedermair:
Positive hardship case: Oscar Piastri
Negative hardship case: Sergio Perez
It’s actually a shame that we only give a grade for the race and not for qualifying. Unfortunately, one quickly forgets the spectacular Saturday, which provides good arguments for why Monaco still has a right to exist in Formula 1. But be that as it may, I don’t want to sugarcoat this subterranean, boring race. Subterranean is also the keyword for Sergio Perez and his performance in qualifying. If he doesn’t go so wrong, he won’t even be exposed to Kevin Magnussen’s overzealous instinctive maneuver on lap 1. Traffic or not, the Red Bull driver had more than one opportunity to set a fast lap on Saturday. Oscar Piastri, on the other hand, impressively demonstrated his qualifying qualities. There is hardly a better place to outshine Lando Norris and take the first podium of the season.
Markus Steinrisser
Positive hardship case: Alex Albon
Negative hardship case: Esteban Ocon
Hey, Williams is still around! A very good weekend was the one of Alex Albon, to finally get rid of this ungrateful zero in the 2024 World Championship table. Great qualifying, good race, mostly stuck behind Yuki Tsunoda. He could have been named here too, but with the generally difficult situation at Williams, I prefer Albon today. Esteban Ocon finally shows us very vividly how you can simply ignore your team’s difficult situation with an absolutely disproportionate high-risk maneuver on the first lap against your teammate. Completely wrong.
The top 5 in the MSM season ranking 2024 to Monaco
As in the real World Championship, Max Verstappen has enough of a buffer in the annual rankings to be able to quickly afford a zero. Behind him, Charles Leclerc, who has been extremely strong in recent races, is now putting Lando Norris under pressure. Pierre Gasly makes his debut with an exclamation mark, namely a seventh place in Monaco. So we now have only one driver who has not yet made it into the top 10 in 2024: Logan Sargeant.
How the MSM driver ranking works
Long-time MSM readers already know the ranking, the now proven system from previous years will be entering its sixth year in 2024. Immediately after the finish of each Grand Prix, we will call you up in our Formula 1 live ticker for the race and here in the article for the ratings of all 20 drivers. You can rate as much as you like until next midday (or longer for evening overseas races).
The average of your marks is used to give each driver a reader’s mark. In parallel with you, we, the MSM F1 crew around Christian Menath, Florian Niedermair and Markus Steinrisser, also rate the performance of all drivers on the weekend in question. We also calculate an average from our judgements – the MSM mark. The overall mark is created in the last step by averaging the user and MSM marks in equal parts. In the event of a tie in the final ranking, the best individual mark decides.
As a little extra, each editor provides his personal hardships of the weekend by choosing and explaining which driver particularly caught his attention. Once in a positive and once in a negative sense. Online, the overall result is always 18:00 the day after the race.