After Monaco, the Best qualifying average table still has a Mercedes 1-2, but the biggest reshuffle is behind it: Lewis Hamilton climbs to P4 while Lando Norris and Oliver Bearman slide.
By Nadia Okafor
Andrea Kimi Antonelli remains the benchmark in the 2026 Best qualifying average ranking after round 6 at Monaco, holding P1 with a 1.33 mean qualifying position. And while the headline is continuity at the top — the leader didn’t change and the top three stayed intact — the more telling post-Monaco story is the squeeze developing just behind the podium places, where small swings now move drivers multiple spots.
The clearest example is Lewis Hamilton’s rise. A qualifying position of 3 at Monaco helped him climb from P6 to P4 in the ranking, improving to a 5.00 average for Ferrari. That matters because it reshapes the immediate chase group beneath the established front-runners: it’s not just about who nails a single Saturday, but who repeatedly converts weekends into a low mean starting spot across every session entered.
The ranking’s top is increasingly defined by Mercedes’ internal standard: Antonelli first on 1.33, George Russell second on 2.83. That 1-2 isn’t simply a feel-good statistic — it sets a demanding reference point for the rest of the field because this methodology uses the full grid position from every qualifying session, not only top-10 shootouts, and it requires at least three sessions before a driver even appears.
Monaco underlined the point: Antonelli qualified P1 and converted that into a win from pole, completing 78 laps for 25 points. Even though race outcomes aren’t what this metric measures, the weekend offered a clean illustration of why a 1.33 average is so hard to touch: it implies a season of near-front-row repetition rather than occasional peaks.
Charles Leclerc remains third on a 4.50 average for Ferrari, but Hamilton’s step forward to fourth makes Ferrari’s qualifying narrative more layered: the team now has a driver in the top three and another immediately behind it on 5.00. In a table where lower is better, that kind of clustering is valuable — it reduces the gap to the very top without needing a single dramatic leap.
Hamilton’s Monaco weekend also shows how the ranking can move without any change at the very front. The maximum movement magnitude after this round was 2 positions, and Hamilton used all of it. That’s a reminder that once the season reaches six completed races, the margins between “very good” and “great” Saturdays can be thin — and they’re thinest in the upper-mid part of the top 10.
Lando Norris took the sharpest hit among the key movers, dropping two places from P4 to P6 with a 5.33 mean qualifying position for McLaren. At Monaco he qualified eighth and later retired after 43 laps; the retirement doesn’t directly affect this ranking, but it’s a blunt reminder that qualifying still has to be banked when it’s available, because the metric is built on session entries rather than race results.
Bearman also fell two spots, sliding from P14 to P16 with a 14.50 average for Haas F1 Team. Those are the kinds of moves that tend to happen when the table is crowded: a couple of weekends that don’t improve the mean can quickly see a driver overtaken by rivals meeting the three-session minimum and nudging their own averages down.
The top-10 cut line tightened. Liam Lawson is the new P10 entrant on 11.50 for RB F1 Team, moving up one place from P11 after Monaco. That came at the expense of Nico Hülkenberg, who drops from P10 to P11 on the same 11.50 average for Audi — a perfect snapshot of how this ranking’s tie-breaks can become decisive when the numbers converge.
There were smaller upward steps too, like Gabriel Bortoleto’s move from P15 to P14 on 14.17 for Audi, but the broader trend is the one signalled by the “streak” flag: the top of the table is stable, while the edges — especially the final top-10 spots — are where the churn is. With only six races completed, the next few qualifying sessions can still re-draw the midfield order without touching the established Mercedes-led summit.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 6 | 4 | +2 | 5.00 |
| Lando Norris | McLaren | 4 | 6 | -2 | 5.33 |
| Oliver Bearman | Haas F1 Team | 14 | 16 | -2 | 14.50 |
Antonelli’s 1.33 keeps the Best qualifying average lead firmly in place, but Monaco showed where the pressure is building: Hamilton’s move to P4 tightens the group behind Leclerc, while Norris’s slide to P6 and the Lawson/Hülkenberg swap at 11.50 underline how little separates the top-10 fringe.