Round 6 at Monaco reshuffled the mid-pack of the 2026 best average race finish table, led by Oliver Bearman dropping out of the top 10. Up front, Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s 1.17 benchmark and win-from-pole only underlined a runaway start to the year.
By Elena Marsh
The biggest swing after the Monaco Grand Prix was a brutal one for Oliver Bearman: from ninth to 14th in best average race finish, a five-place drop that tells its own story in a ranking that counts every classified result. Starting 19th and classified 20th as Retired after 27 laps, Bearman’s season average moved to 12.50 — and with it he became the headline example of how quickly this metric punishes a non-finish.
At the front, there was no change in the main reference points. Andrea Kimi Antonelli remains the clear No.1 with a 1.17 average, and Monaco reinforced it in the most emphatic way possible: pole (qualifying position 1), victory from grid 1, 25 points and 78 laps completed. With the top three unchanged — Lewis Hamilton second on 3.83 and Charles Leclerc third on 6.50 — the story here is less about volatility at the top and more about how hard it is for anyone else to build a similar ‘always there’ profile across all six races completed.
The movement instead clustered around the edge of the top 10, where the line between ‘reliably strong’ and ‘one bad Sunday’ is thin. Lando Norris slid from sixth to 10th, his average now 11.50, while Oscar Piastri moved the other way: up three places from 10th to seventh with a 10.17 average, helped at Monaco by converting grid 7 into fifth place and 10 points over 78 laps. Liam Lawson’s jump from 11th to eighth (10.33) added to that squeeze — and with Bearman exiting the top 10 and Lawson entering it, the Monaco reset made the cut-off noticeably more ruthless.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oliver Bearman | Haas F1 Team | 9 | 14 | -5 | 12.50 |
| Lando Norris | McLaren | 6 | 10 | -4 | 11.50 |
| Oscar Piastri | McLaren | 10 | 7 | +3 | 10.17 |
With Antonelli (1.17) and the top three unchanged after six races, the clearest opportunities are in the compressed midfield of the ranking: one retirement can eject a driver from the top 10, while a single solid finish can lift others several places — as Piastri’s move to seventh and Lawson’s entry to eighth showed.