In terms of making a meal of 4th in the WDC, yeah I get that on paper that's very much what it looks like. But unlike Hamilton and Stroll who missed 1 race, Perez actually missed 2 races, 12% of the season.
It's also plausible that he was struggling with COVID after-effects in the following races (they just weren't spoken about like they were with Stroll and Hamilton), and he was unfortunate in Monza as well.
All of this l meant that for a few races he wasn't getting the (pretty good looking) upgrades his teammate had.
It's not that surprising that he struggled to secure P4, as at this stage of the season Perez was very much on the back foot. But as explained above I don't think it's fair to put that all on his consistency.
Overall I don't think he maximized the potential of the car, but then again, very few drivers did. I could understand someone making the case for Sainz or maybe Gasly to be rated above Perez, but that's very much it.
What I find a lot more surprising is the media rating Perez above Leclerc and Ricciardo, which is something the people in this thread at least didn't do.
So I'm not sure if I see the same 'Perez love' as you do, unless you were talking about the media, and then I'd probably agree with you, that they rate him an 8.1, just 0.5 down from Verstappen, is very questionable.
I wanted to compare our ratings with those of the media. But as the media apparently gives significantly higher ratings than we do, I took the average of both columns and inserted that difference into the calculation.
So for example, Verstappen was rated 8.79 by us and 8.62 by the media, which is a difference of -0.17. But the average rating of the media is about 0.56 higher, which makes the 'net' difference -0.72.
I found it gave a clearer picture of who was over- or underrated by either side.
Not sure I'd agree about the pre-covid races as I don't think he did that well there either but in all fairness I hadn't consider the potential long term effects of covid so you probably have a point there. Personally I'm of the opinion that if a driver's not fully fit he shouldn't be driving and can't use it as an excuse, but I can see why others may feel differently. His second half of the year was decent enough, just the first half was not impressive for me
