Who was your standout driver at the (entirely uneventful) Japanese Grand Prix?

Oscar Piastri summed it up perfectly after the highlights reel in the cool down room ended mercifully quickly. “That’s all the highlights?” asked the puzzled Aussie. “For a race that felt like it was pretty flat out, nothing happened.”

He wasn’t wrong. There was one overtake in the top 10 – Lewis Hamilton’s early move on RB’s Isack Hadjar – and outside the points the most places anyone gained was four, with Jack Doohan lifting his hastily repaired Alpine from 19th on the grid to P15 at the flag.

There were no exploding engines, no double-waved yellows, and no safety car to spice things up. Even the grass – which had spent most of practice and qualifying spontaneously catching fire – reverted to… just being grass. Zzzzz.

Still, amid the tedium there were a number of impressive performances, most notably from a trio of F1’s rookies.

Obviously Max Verstappen (definitely no rookie) was in a class of his own, somehow wrestling his nervous and twitchy Red Bull to pole with a stunning Q3 lap, and then guiding it to the top step of the podium without so much as a lock-up on the way. What’s the Dutch word for ‘impeccable’?

But (far) behind him, we reckon there’s three names worthy of mention. Oliver Bearman grabbed a well-earned point for Haas having qualified eight whole places higher than teammate Esteban Ocon, and a little further up the road Isack Hadjar was also rewarded for a strong quali lap with his first points of the season in P8.

Side note: the Frenchman beat Yuki Tsunoda – now ‘upgraded’ to the other Red Bull seat – and second-teammate-in-three-races Liam Lawson. His debut in Australia might’ve ended in tears (literally), but he’s doing alright isn’t he?

And then there was Andrea Kimi Antonelli. Starting just behind George Russell in P6, Mercedes’ youngster eked out a monster first stint on medium tyres, making them last even longer than Hamilton managed on hards.

And when the top two made their only stops it allowed the 18-year-old to briefly run at the front, making him the youngest race leader in F1 history, beating Verstappen’s old record by four days.

In his second stint the Italian was rapid, closing back up to Russell by the end and snatching another record away from Max. Yup, he’s now the youngest driver to set a fastest lap in a grand prix too.

Let us know if we’ve missed anyone. We’ll blame that impromptu mid-race nap if we did…