Four races into 2026, Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s Miami win and 25 points preserve a commanding Best average race finish figure of 1.25. The biggest shake-up came lower down: Oscar Piastri surged into the top 10 while Liam Lawson’s retirement triggered the largest drop of the week.
By Diego Torres
Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s Miami Grand Prix weekend at the Miami International Autodrome did exactly what the Best average race finish ranking rewards: it reinforced a season-long pattern of bringing home results. From pole (qualifying and grid position 1) he converted to the race win, completed 57 laps, and took 25 points — and, crucially for this metric, added another P1 to a set of four classified outcomes that leaves his average race finish at an outstanding 1.25.
There was no change at the top despite the Miami data point being as strong as it gets. The top three remains unchanged too, which says plenty about how quickly this ranking stabilises when the same names keep turning in front-running classifications. George Russell is still second on 2.75, with Charles Leclerc third on 4.50, setting a clear early-season benchmark for what “reliability” looks like when it’s measured strictly by official classification position, retirements included.
Liam Lawson’s Sunday was the weekend’s pivot point for this table. He started 11th (qualifying 11th), but was classified 20th with a status of Retired after 6 laps and scored 0 points. Because this ranking counts every race entry — retirements included at their classification order — that single low classification hit his average sharply enough to produce the biggest movement magnitude in the update: down 8 places, from sixth to 14th, to a valueDisplay of 12.25.
That drop also carried a wider knock-on effect: Lawson is one of the two drivers who fell out of the top 10 after Miami (alongside Arvid Lindblad). In a metric built to punish non-finishes as hard as bad finishes, top-10 residency can be fragile once a retirement lands — especially after only four races, when each entry still has a large influence on the mean.
Oscar Piastri was the clearest beneficiary of Miami’s classification order. Starting seventh, he finished third, ran the full 57 laps, and scored 15 points — the kind of clean, high finish that steadily drags an average down in the right direction. The immediate consequence is a 7-place jump from 15th to eighth, bringing him into the top 10 entrants list with an average race finish valueDisplay of 11.25.
Franco Colapinto also capitalised on Miami to push into the top 10: up 4 places from 14th to 10th, now on 11.75 for Alpine F1 Team. Not every upward move needs to be a leap toward the podium fight to matter in this ranking; with four races completed, simply avoiding the outlier result that Lawson just suffered can be the difference between hanging around the top 10 and being forced to rebuild your average over multiple rounds.
The broader midfield picture is still being shaped by swings rather than slow drift, which is typical this early. Alexander Albon moved up 3 places from 21st to 18th for Williams, landing on a valueDisplay of 16.00, while Pierre Gasly slid 2 places from fifth to seventh to 11.00 for Alpine F1 Team — a reminder that even drivers still comfortably placed can lose ground as others add strong classified finishes.
One more signal matters as a framing tool: the ranking’s streak indicator is active, and the top-three-unchanged flag confirms how sticky the front of this table becomes when there are no disruptive results. With the minimum threshold set at 3 races and every retirement counting, the next few rounds will be decisive not because they “decide” anything, but because they can either entrench early patterns — Antonelli’s 1.25, Russell’s 2.75, Leclerc’s 4.50 — or puncture them with one bad classification.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Liam Lawson | RB F1 Team | 6 | 14 | -8 | 12.25 |
| Oscar Piastri | McLaren | 15 | 8 | +7 | 11.25 |
| Franco Colapinto | Alpine F1 Team | 14 | 10 | +4 | 11.75 |
Antonelli’s 1.25 keeps the bar for week-to-week finishing consistency extremely high, and with the top three unchanged the pressure shifts to the chasing pack to string together clean classifications. For Piastri and Colapinto, cracking the top 10 turns “one strong Sunday” into a platform — while Lawson’s 20th-place retirement shows how quickly a single classified DNF can undo early-season progress in an average-finish metric.