The Belgian Grand Prix has flipped the top of the 2026 Most overtakes ranking: Isack Hadjar vaults from eighth to first on 56, just ahead of Max Verstappen on 55. Behind them, big swings reshuffle the top 10 as the metric’s fine print makes every lasting pass count.
By Elena Marsh
Isack Hadjar is the new leader of the 2026 Most overtakes ranking after Spa-Francorchamps, and it’s as emphatic a takeover as you can manage in a metric that usually moves in small increments. Hadjar jumped from eighth to first, rising to 56 to overhaul the previous leader Max Verstappen, who now sits second on 55. It’s a one-overtake margin at the top — but created by a seven-place surge that instantly re-frames the season’s passing narrative.
That swing matters because this ranking isn’t a highlights reel; it’s built from the lap-by-lap position chart, counting a pass only when a driver is behind at the end of one lap and ahead at the end of the next — with pit-stop shuffles stripped out unless the strategic gain sticks all the way to the finish. In that context, Hadjar leaving Spa with 56 is both volume and durability, and it arrives alongside a tangible race reference point: he finished sixth after starting 21st, collecting 8 points across 44 laps. The ranking lead has changed hands; the benchmark for sustained, ‘real’ track progression has too.
The headline is the lead change, but the real story is how tight this has become among the front three. Verstappen is only one behind Hadjar (55 to 56), while Oscar Piastri is third on 50. That places the top three within six of each other after 10 races completed — close enough that a single strong weekend can rewrite the order, but also tight enough that consistency across the season’s changing race shapes will decide who stays visible at the top.
It also underlines what Spa has done to the leaderboard’s geometry. Hadjar’s seven-place leap didn’t just nudge Verstappen down a spot; it compressed the front, turning what was Verstappen’s lead into a knife-edge chase. In a ranking where pit-lane position swaps are generally filtered out, that compression tends to reflect repeated, repeatable opportunities rather than one-off anomalies. Hadjar has moved from being a background name in this list to the reference point everyone else is chasing.
Spa’s impact wasn’t confined to the top: the most violent movement in the ranking belonged to Hadjar, but two other swings signpost how quickly this table can punish a quieter stretch. George Russell has fallen from third to eighth, down five places to 47. Nico Hülkenberg has dropped from fourth to seventh, down three places to 48 — a notable slide given that 48 would ordinarily look like a top-five-worthy total in many weeks. When the leading trio is clustered around the mid-50s, the difference between ‘in the fight’ and ‘swallowed by the pack’ can be a handful of net overtakes across a couple of races.
Russell’s Spa weekend is also a reminder of the methodology’s limits: retirements don’t create phantom gains for anyone, because a pass is only counted while both drivers are still running. Russell is classified as Retired with 0 laps completed from a grid spot of 3, and that absence of racing distance tends to freeze a driver’s ability to add to their tally while others accumulate. In a tight top 10, that’s how a driver can go from a podium position in the ranking to the lower half of the top 10 in a single round.
Further down, there’s churn at the cut line. Esteban Ocon is the new 10th-place entrant, moving from 12th to 10th on 41 for Haas F1 Team — and that matters because it changes who is even visible in the ranking’s headline set. The corresponding exit is Carlos Sainz, who drops from 10th to 12th on 40 for Williams, showing how fine the margins are around the top-10 boundary: one net overtake’s worth of separation in totals, but two positions in rank.
Pierre Gasly’s movement is the other quiet tell. He climbs from seventh to fifth on 48 for Alpine F1 Team, landing on the same season total shown for Hülkenberg but now ahead on position. With ties broken by season points and then alphabetically, the table isn’t just about raw overtakes; it’s also about how those totals sit within the broader season context. After Spa, the top is razor-thin, the mid-pack is densely stacked, and the top-10 threshold has become a weekly negotiation rather than a fixed club.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Isack Hadjar | Red Bull | 8 | 1 | +7 | 56 |
| George Russell | Mercedes | 3 | 8 | -5 | 47 |
| Nico Hülkenberg | Audi | 4 | 7 | -3 | 48 |
Hadjar’s move to 56 turns the Most overtakes lead into a one-pass margin over Verstappen (55), with Piastri close enough on 50 to stay relevant. With Russell down to eighth and the top-10 cut line at 41–40, small swings in ‘lasting’ passes can keep rewriting both the front and the edges of this ranking.