Round 4 at Miami flipped the top of the Power ranking: Andrea Kimi Antonelli moved from P2 to P1 with 64.2, while previous leader Charles Leclerc fell from P1 to P3. The margin at the top is tight, but the gap behind the leading pair is already pronounced.
By Diego Torres
The Miami Grand Prix has produced a genuine lead change in the 2026 Power ranking, with Andrea Kimi Antonelli rising from second to first and setting the headline composite score at 64.2 for Mercedes. That is enough to dislodge Charles Leclerc, who had been the previous leader but drops two places to third on 40.7 after round 4.
What makes the switch so striking is the shape of the table, not just the identity of the driver at the top. Max Verstappen remains second for Red Bull on 63.3 — only 0.9 away from Antonelli — while Leclerc’s 40.7 underlines how quickly the ranking can separate the season into tiers when it blends teammate head-to-head, grid-to-finish gain, consistency/reliability, and qualifying position into a single 0–100 score.
Antonelli’s Miami result is about as clean a ‘ranking-positive’ weekend as this methodology can capture. He qualified first, started from pole (grid 1), and converted it into a win (position 1) over 57 laps, scoring 25 points and finishing. That combination feeds multiple components at once: average qualifying position, consistency/reliability (a classified finish), and—crucially in this ranking—head-to-head strength across the season’s counted rounds.
The consequence is a one-place rise (P2 to P1) rather than a dramatic climb through the order, but it is still a major swing because it happens at the very top. With Verstappen sitting just behind on 63.3, Antonelli’s 64.2 doesn’t create breathing room; it simply moves him to the front of an extremely tight two-driver fight where a small shift in any component can flip the lead again.
Leclerc’s Miami numbers show how this ranking can punish an off-week even when it still produces a classified finish and a handful of points. He qualified third and started third, but finished eighth, scoring 4 points across 57 laps. In grid-to-finish terms that is a five-position loss (3 to 8), which is exactly the kind of swing that drags down the positions-gained component that carries 30% of the total score.
The result is not just a loss of the lead but a fall from first to third, and it happens with an eye-catching score drop-off versus the top two: Leclerc’s 40.7 is more than 20 points away from Verstappen’s 63.3 and 23.5 back from Antonelli’s 64.2. That gap doesn’t declare the season, but it does raise the stakes of the next few rounds because the methodology is built on scaled components: once a driver is on the wrong side of ‘best vs worst’ in a given area, the points can disappear quickly.
Leclerc wasn’t the only Ferrari driver to move backward. Lewis Hamilton slips one place from third to fourth, landing on 40.6 — only 0.1 behind Leclerc’s 40.7 — which hints at how closely matched Ferrari’s internal ranking picture is at this stage. That closeness matters because teammate head-to-head is the single biggest component at 40%, so even small week-to-week differences can be magnified across the season sample.
Mercedes, meanwhile, has a secondary ripple effect: George Russell drops from fourth to fifth on 35.3 as Antonelli goes the other way. And there is a quieter but notable change further down, with Lando Norris entering the top 10 at sixth on 31.7. No one exits the top 10 this round, so Norris’s arrival represents compression in the midfield end of the list rather than a one-in, one-out swap — another sign that the ranking is settling into shape after four races completed.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Charles Leclerc | Ferrari | 1 | 3 | -2 | 40.7 |
| Andrea Kimi Antonelli | Mercedes | 2 | 1 | +1 | 64.2 |
| Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 3 | 4 | -1 | 40.6 |
Antonelli’s 64.2 puts him in front, but Verstappen’s 63.3 keeps the Power ranking lead effectively within a single point. The bigger takeaway is the early-tier split: Leclerc and Hamilton are separated by only 0.1 on 40.7/40.6, yet both sit far adrift of the top two, meaning Ferrari needs cleaner weekends to stop the gap hardening as more sessions meet the minimum thresholds.