Monza reinforced Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s season-long steadiness: his 2.67 mean classified finish remains the benchmark after round 13. The more intriguing shift happened behind him, with George Russell moving ahead of Lewis Hamilton in a tight fight near the top.
By Elena Marsh
Andrea Kimi Antonelli still sets the standard in 2026’s Most consistent drivers ranking after winning the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. With consistency measured as mean finishing position across classified races only, Antonelli’s 2.67 remains the best figure in the field after 13 races completed, and Mercedes now has a 1-2 at the top of this table.
The headline here is less about a change at the very top — there wasn’t one — and more about how Antonelli is consolidating a lead built on clean, high-end results. His Monza weekend underlined the point: he converted a 7th-place qualifying position into a race win and 25 points over 53 laps, the kind of swing that also protects a low average finish when the metric ignores DNFs entirely. In a race that still saw 3 retirements, simply being there at the flag mattered.
George Russell’s move from 3rd to 2nd is the most important reshuffle near the summit, and it has immediate consequences because it pushes Lewis Hamilton off the podium places in this ranking. Russell now sits on a 3.64 mean classified finish, while Hamilton has slipped from 2nd to 4th on 3.92 — a small numerical gap that nonetheless changes the shape of the top group.
The contrast at Monza helps explain why this metric can pivot quickly: Hamilton was classified 6th and scored 8 points after qualifying 5th, which is solid, but not quite the kind of result that keeps you comfortably ahead when rivals are averaging better classified finishes across the season. Meanwhile, the top three is now Antonelli, Russell, and Lando Norris, with Norris also moving up one place to 3rd on 3.90 — leaving Hamilton on the wrong side of an increasingly tight top-four pack.
With Antonelli unchanged at number one and the rest shuffling, the ranking is starting to look like two stories at once: a leader who keeps banking the kind of finishes that preserve a 2.67 average, and a chasing group separated by decimals. Norris’s rise to 3rd on 3.90, just 0.02 better than Hamilton’s 3.92, is the clearest signal that this is becoming a week-to-week knife-edge whenever the front runners don’t land right at the sharp end.
It also highlights how this ranking rewards repeatability rather than damage limitation. Because DNFs are excluded entirely, the premium is on what happens on the days you’re classified — and that’s why a single middling classified result can be enough to lose ground if your rivals keep stacking top-end finishes. The ‘streak’ signal continuing in the background fits the theme: the season is developing patterns of reliability, and the drivers who keep converting weekends into classified results near the front are the ones turning consistency into separation.
Further back, Franco Colapinto made the biggest step among the key movers, climbing two positions from 15th to 13th for Alpine F1 Team with a 10.83 mean classified finish. His Monza classified finish of 9th, worth 2 points, is exactly the kind of result that can steadily pull a driver upward in a metric built around average classified position rather than peaks and troughs.
Not every swing was positive. Oliver Bearman dropped two places from 13th to 15th with an 11.50 figure for Haas F1 Team, an illustration of how quickly the lower half can reorder when several drivers sit on similar averages and the ranking is recalculated after each round. And Liam Lawson’s one-place drop from 9th to 10th on 8.57 underlines the same point: in the middle of the table, small shifts in where you’re classified can have outsized effects on rank.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Franco Colapinto | Alpine F1 Team | 15 | 13 | +2 | 10.83 |
| Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 2 | 4 | -2 | 3.92 |
| Oliver Bearman | Haas F1 Team | 13 | 15 | -2 | 11.50 |
Antonelli’s 2.67 keeps him comfortably in front of the consistency table, but the story behind is tightening: Russell (3.64) has moved into clear second while Norris (3.90) and Hamilton (3.92) are separated by just 0.02, so a single classified result can flip the podium places in this ranking.