After two races, Andrea Kimi Antonelli is the new leader in 2026’s most top-10 finishes ranking, edging ahead on the tie-break with George Russell and Charles Leclerc. The Chinese Grand Prix also reshuffled the midfield as Liam Lawson and Isack Hadjar climbed sharply into the top 10.
By Julian Reyes
The headline move after the Chinese Grand Prix is at the very top: Andrea Kimi Antonelli is now the leader of the 2026 most top-10 finishes ranking. On the raw count there’s nothing to split the front three — Antonelli, George Russell and Charles Leclerc all sit on 2 top-10 finishes after 2 races — but with the ranking’s tie-break set by season points, Antonelli’s Shanghai win from pole (25 points) has flipped him ahead of the previous leader Russell.
That context matters because this table is as much about week-to-week execution as it is about peaks, and Mercedes has placed two drivers in the top three on consistency alone. The early season story is therefore less a runaway and more a knife-edge: a single non-top-10 classified finish would immediately break the three-way lock on 2, and with no streak signal attached yet, there’s no cushion from a longer run of results to lean on.
Behind them, the biggest positional swings came from the drivers who finally converted into top-10s in Shanghai. Liam Lawson’s seventh-place finish from 14th on the grid brought 6 points and lifted him from 18th to ninth on 1 top-10 finish, while Isack Hadjar jumped from 16th to 10th on the same tally. Those gains came at a cost to others: Arvid Lindblad and Gabriel Bortoleto dropped out of the top 10 entirely, and Bortoleto’s weekend was especially damaging to a consistency metric given he “Did not start” and remains on 0 top-10 finishes, falling from ninth to 13th.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Liam Lawson | RB F1 Team | 18 | 9 | +9 | 1 |
| Isack Hadjar | Red Bull | 16 | 10 | +6 | 1 |
| Gabriel Bortoleto | Audi | 9 | 13 | -4 | 0 |
With Antonelli, Russell and Leclerc all on 2 top-10 finishes, the lead is currently being decided by points rather than consistency count — and Antonelli’s 25-point Shanghai win is the separator. Further back, Lawson and Hadjar have moved into position where a second top-10 could rapidly compress the top-10 fight, while Bortoleto’s 0 leaves him needing simply to start converting classified finishes into top-10s to regain ground.