Alguersuari seemed to have improved immensely a few races ago but in the last couple of races hes done really poor where as Buemi has Shined.
Also its quite funny how if you look at all these drivers previous results in GP2, Kobayashi is clearly the worst of them all yet its quite the opposite in F1.
Things like this make it extremely hard for driver scouts to find the right talent.
An interresting info on di Grassi: his car is still heavier than the minimal weight, while Glock's isn't. This of course represents a big disavantage for him.
To be fair to Petrov, he realised there were no point in stuffing himself up just for the sake of holding up Lewis at lap 2 of the race. If he tried to defend then he most definitly wouldn't have finished 5th.
As for Kobayashi, his job wasn't made toooooooo hard from 23rd after all. He did incredibly in the first lap to pass those 7 cars, then he didn't have to pass any (other then when a Toro Rosso ran wide) and still finished 9th, thanks to the chaos at the pitlane...
Well if you go back a little bit further, Alonso was sensational in his first race and knocked up some championship points whilst driving by far the slowest car in the field. It was clear from his first race that Alonso would win at least 1 title.
Another brilliant rookie was Jean Alesi who very nearly won his maiden Grand Prix, but was thwarted by Ayrton Senna - the battle where Senna passed Alesi was so rivetting it had me stood on the sofa screaming as the young upstart made the world sit up and take notice. He was driving a sodding Tyrrell, and he was holding his own!
But the best rookie of all time has to be Giancarlo Baghetti, who won his first 3 grand prix, and retired from the next 2 after setting fastest laps. He then retired from Formula 1.
EDIT: Wikipedia shows 2 of the races where non-championship, and he did do more racing than I thought before retiring. None-the-less, hell of a rookie.
It could be argued that Johnnie Parsons also won his first F1 race, but he entered and raced the Indianapolis 500, a race which used to be part of the F1 calendar but which few European teams bothered to show up for, making the victory somewhat pyric in nature.
Nino Farina, who won the first ever GP to be held, doesn't really count.
Against drivers like that the rookies of this year don't really stack up too well. Nobody has stood out with exceptional performances but a lot of that is due to the "rookie teams" which are so far off the pace the cars are being driving in a manner to get them to the finish line rather than to perform well.
With that in mind i'm not yet casting judgement on the new guys. I think they're getting more experience of the logistics of attending an F1 season than they are of driving an F1.
Jean made you jump up and down at the first GP in 1990 at Phoenix, but his first GP was France the year before where he finished 4th - one place better than Martin Brundle's 84 debut which is worth a mention.
Sorry but Alonso didn't score any points in 2001, his best result was a 10th. But since the Minardi was clearly out of the pace, fighting with the Benetton, the Arrows and the Prosts was the best he could do I guess.
A lot of things have been written on him but I guess he's always been overrated because of that achievement - being the only driver of the F1 history to win a GP for his first race. What the history won't remember of is that he was on Ferrari - which was by far the dominant car in 1961 - and that the 3 other Ferraris had problems in that race.
He's won 3 non-championship races that year according to StatsF1, but only 1 of them was with a decent field(19 cars) and he was the only one on Ferrari, another one was with 13 cars but the field didn't seem to be that strong and he still was the only one on Ferrari, and the last one was on Porsche okay, but the field was quite weak I'd say, with 9 cars all driven by Italian drivers who drove very few championship races.
After switching to ATS in 1963 and then BRM in 1964 he was nowhere it seems.