The Singapore Grand Prix weekend didn’t change the name at the top, but it did reshape the fight just behind: Lewis Hamilton dropped three places as Charles Leclerc climbed past him in qualifying head-to-head terms.
By Camille Fontaine
Fernando Alonso remains the reference point in the 2026 Teammate head-to-head (qualifying) ranking after round 17 at Marina Bay, holding P1 with a 13–2 record for Aston Martin. The lead didn’t change hands, but Singapore still mattered: it produced the biggest swing among the key movers, with Lewis Hamilton sliding three positions from ninth to 12th and, crucially, being jumped by his own Ferrari team-mate in the ordering.
That contrast is the point of this metric. It’s built from sessions where both drivers from a constructor set a qualifying position, with the better qualifier taking the “win”, and it deliberately avoids guessing when a driver has no race-result row for that round. Across 17 races completed, Alonso’s 13 wins stand as a mark of week-to-week qualifying edge over his team-mate, even on a weekend where his own Singapore snapshot was complicated by a 17th qualifying position and a race result of 16th after starting 20th.
Ferrari provided the cleanest storyline in the ranking movement. Leclerc jumped from 10th to eighth and now sits on a 9–8 record; Hamilton fell the other way, from ninth to 12th, with an 8–9 record. That’s not just a pass in the table — it’s a swing from Hamilton being narrowly above .500 in head-to-head terms earlier in the season to being narrowly below it after Singapore, while Leclerc has nudged himself to the positive side of the ledger.
The weekend’s on-track numbers underline why this ranking moved the way it did. In Singapore qualifying, Leclerc was P2 and Hamilton P3, and that single position difference is exactly the kind of marginal gain that accumulates over a season in a wins–losses format. Sunday’s results went Leclerc P2 for 18 points and Hamilton P6 for 8, but for this ranking the headline is simpler: the qualifier who starts ahead tends to keep generating the ‘wins’ that decide these internal duels.
The top-10 churn wasn’t just a Ferrari story. Liam Lawson moved into ninth for RB F1 Team, up two places from 11th, and he arrives with the kind of record that screams knife-edge: 9–8. That placed him among the top-10 entrants this week, a signal that the midfield’s qualifying pecking order inside teams is still volatile even with 17 rounds on the board.
There was a corresponding exit: Lewis Hamilton dropping out of the top 10 is explicitly flagged in the standings changes. In a ranking ordered first by total head-to-head wins and then by win rate, slipping behind on wins can quickly snowball into losing multiple positions at once — and Singapore delivered the weekend’s maximum movement magnitude of three places through Hamilton’s fall.
The top three themselves stayed stable: Alonso leads on 13–2, with Max Verstappen second on 13–3 for Red Bull and Carlos Sainz third on 13–3 for Williams. But the numbers show there’s still separation even among the elite: Alonso’s two losses versus Verstappen’s and Sainz’s three is a small gap, yet it’s the difference between standing alone at the top and being part of a tie on wins that then comes down to win rate.
Elsewhere, the clustering of records around 9–8 and 8–9 is why each qualifying Saturday can ripple through the order. Gabriel Bortoleto dropped from eighth to 10th despite holding a 9–8 record, while Sergio Pérez rose two spots to 11th with 9–8. Even within RB F1 Team, the movement cut both ways: Lawson climbed to ninth as Arvid Lindblad slipped one place to 13th with 8–9, a reminder that the ranking is a rolling audit of who is consistently beating the driver in the other garage.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 9 | 12 | -3 | 8–9 |
| Charles Leclerc | Ferrari | 10 | 8 | +2 | 9–8 |
| Liam Lawson | RB F1 Team | 11 | 9 | +2 | 9–8 |
Alonso’s 13–2 cushion keeps him comfortably in control of the qualifying head-to-head table, while Ferrari’s internal balance is the story to watch: Leclerc (9–8) has moved ahead of Hamilton (8–9) in the ranking order, and with so many drivers clustered around near-even records, another single-session swing can reshuffle the top 10 quickly.