Four rounds into 2026, the Championship ranking remains headed by Andrea Kimi Antonelli on 100 points, with George Russell still his closest chaser on 80. Miami didn’t change the top three, but it triggered a sharp set of swings just behind it.
By Elena Marsh
Andrea Kimi Antonelli leaves the Miami Grand Prix with the Championship ranking still under his control, and with the cleanest kind of statement weekend: pole position, 57 laps completed, and 25 points for the win from grid position 1. That locks him onto 100 points after round 4, and crucially it keeps the order at the very top unchanged in a season that’s already beginning to form its early shape.
Behind him, the pressure remains internal to Mercedes rather than coming from outside. George Russell stays second on 80, a 20-point gap that is meaningful this early because it represents almost an entire race win’s worth of points. Charles Leclerc is still third on 59, which frames the next layer of the story: the top three hasn’t moved, but the fight for best-of-the-rest positions just beneath it is tightening — and in Miami, it was movement rather than stability that defined that chase.
The headline from the top of the Championship ranking is not change, but consolidation. Antonelli’s 100-point total paired with Russell’s 80 gives Mercedes a one-two that has held firm through Miami, and Antonelli’s 25-point haul in the race itself is the kind of maximum score that prevents any creeping momentum for the drivers behind.
The significance is twofold. First, with Leclerc on 59, there’s now a clear separation between the Mercedes pair and the closest non-Mercedes runner. Second, because the top three did not change at all after Miami, the burden shifts to everyone else to force volatility elsewhere — and Miami’s biggest shifts came not at the front, but in how quickly drivers can climb (or slide) when their weekends don’t convert into points.
Franco Colapinto delivered the biggest jump of the round, climbing five places from 16th to 11th for Alpine F1 Team on 7 points. The Miami details underline why that’s a meaningful swing rather than a cosmetic one: starting 8th, finishing 7th, and banking 6 points from a full-distance 57-lap finish is the kind of single-race return that can transform the lower half of the standings in one hit.
Max Verstappen also made a notable move in the opposite direction of the early-season narrative you might expect: up two positions, from 9th to 7th, to reach 26 points for Red Bull. It’s not a leap toward the very top yet — the leading totals are far ahead — but it matters because it shifts Verstappen into a different bracket of the table, where small week-to-week variations can quickly turn into a sustained climb if the points keep accumulating.
Gabriel Bortoleto’s Miami round was a sharp illustration of how quickly the Championship ranking can punish a point-less weekend. The Audi driver dropped two places, from 13th to 15th, and remains on 2 points — a slide that matches the story of his Miami result: 21st on the grid, 12th at the flag, listed as lapped after 56 laps, and zero points scored.
That fragility extends upward too. Lewis Hamilton slipped one place from 4th to 5th despite sitting on 51 points for Ferrari, while Lando Norris rose from 5th to 4th also on 51 for McLaren — a reminder that championship position, not just raw points, is the decisive tie-breaker in how the table is read. Oliver Bearman also dropped a place, from 7th to 8th, on 17 points for Haas F1 Team, reinforcing the broader Miami pattern: the top is stable, but the layers beneath it are in constant motion.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Franco Colapinto | Alpine F1 Team | 16 | 11 | +5 | 7 |
| Max Verstappen | Red Bull | 9 | 7 | +2 | 26 |
| Gabriel Bortoleto | Audi | 13 | 15 | -2 | 2 |
With the top three unchanged and Antonelli already at 100 points, the early-season Championship ranking is developing a clear front-running shape — but Miami showed how quickly positions can flip beneath it, where swings like Colapinto’s 16th-to-11th jump and the Norris-Hamilton swap on 51 points can redefine the chase from one round to the next.