After nine rounds, the top of the 2026 Best qualifying average ranking is unchanged: Andrea Kimi Antonelli leads from George Russell and Lewis Hamilton. The shifts came just outside the elite group, where Liam Lawson’s tiny gain nudged him past Pierre Gasly.
By Nadia Okafor
The headline after Silverstone is continuity at the sharp end and a subtle reshuffle behind it. Andrea Kimi Antonelli remains the season’s qualifying benchmark with a 1.78 mean grid position, and the podium of this ranking is unchanged: George Russell sits second on 2.56 and Lewis Hamilton third on 4.22.
But the most important movement in the table came from Liam Lawson, whose one-place rise from 10th to 9th (10.67) is the kind of marginal gain that matters in a metric built on averages rather than peaks. With the maximum movement magnitude this week capped at 1, the story is less about swings and more about consolidation: keeping the best end of the order stable while the midfield battle tightens by tenths of a position across a growing sample of sessions.
Antonelli’s British Grand Prix weekend underlined why his average is so hard to touch: he qualified 1st at Silverstone. That single data point doesn’t explain the entire 1.78 on its own, but it reinforces the wider pattern across the nine rounds completed — he keeps starting at the very front often enough that even an off-day on Sunday can’t dent his standing in a qualifying-only measure.
Russell remains the nearest reference point at 2.56, a reminder that this isn’t a runaway in raw pace so much as a sustained edge. Hamilton’s 4.22 in third adds another layer: the top three contains two Mercedes drivers and a Ferrari driver, but with the top three unchanged after round 9, the immediate intrigue shifts to who can chip away at those averages rather than who has a single standout Saturday.
Lawson’s move for RB F1 Team is the cleanest positional win of the week: up to 9th with a 10.67 average, turning what had been a top-10 fringe position into something slightly more secure. It also came with a timely Silverstone reference point — qualifying 10th — the kind of result that keeps an average from drifting in the wrong direction over time.
Just behind, RB’s other improver Arvid Lindblad climbed from 12th to 11th on 11.56. And Gabriel Bortoleto made it a three-driver list of incremental winners by taking Audi from 14th to 13th, sitting on 13.33. None of those moves transform the front of the table, but together they show how the mid-pack qualifying picture is being decided by small, repeatable gains rather than dramatic one-off jumps.
The flip side of Lawson’s step forward is Pierre Gasly’s slide from 9th to 10th, now on a 10.78 average for Alpine F1 Team. Silverstone encapsulated the vulnerability of that position: Gasly qualified 12th, which is the sort of session that can pull a season-long mean backwards when you’re fighting to stay inside the top 10 of a ranking based on the full field.
Audi also had a counter-movement as Nico Hülkenberg fell from 11th to 12th on 11.67, while Alpine’s Franco Colapinto dropped from 13th to 14th with a 13.67. With only one-place swings available this week and the ‘streak’ continuing, the next phase of this ranking is about whether these small reversals become trends — because in an average-based table, the punishment for a run of slightly-worse Saturdays compounds quickly.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Liam Lawson | RB F1 Team | 10 | 9 | +1 | 10.67 |
| Arvid Lindblad | RB F1 Team | 12 | 11 | +1 | 11.56 |
| Gabriel Bortoleto | Audi | 14 | 13 | +1 | 13.33 |
With the top three unchanged after round 9, the key battle in this ranking is now the creeping squeeze behind them: Lawson’s 10.67 puts him just ahead of Gasly’s 10.78, while the 11th–14th cluster (Lindblad 11.56, Hülkenberg 11.67, Bortoleto 13.33, Colapinto 13.67) shows how a single qualifying session can re-order the midfield even when the headline numbers barely move.