After Monza, Lewis Hamilton is still the benchmark for consistency: 13 top-10 finishes from 13 races. Behind him, Mercedes’ duo tightened their hold on the next places while Charles Leclerc’s retirement triggered the biggest drop near the front.
By Elena Marsh
Lewis Hamilton remains the standard-setter in F1’s 2026 “Most top-10 finishes” ranking, and Monza underlined why. His sixth-place finish at the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza took him to 13 top-10 finishes from 13 races completed, preserving a perfect record in a metric where only classified, top-10 results count and retirements never do.
That reliability picture mattered even more because a direct Ferrari reference point went the other way: Charles Leclerc retired after just 1 lap, scoring 0 points, and that non-finish can’t contribute to this table. With the ranking’s streak signal still active, Hamilton’s run of banked results continues to separate him from the field even without a change at the top.
The top three did change, but not in a way that threatens the leader’s cushion. Andrea Kimi Antonelli sits second on 11 top-10 finishes, while George Russell moved up to third on 10, edging into a cluster where single results can reshuffle order even when the raw totals look similar.
Russell’s climb from fourth to third is a good example of how narrow the margins are: he is now level on 10 top-10 finishes with Lando Norris, but ahead in the ranking order. It’s a reminder that this table rewards week-to-week conversion into top-10 classifications, and the battle for the final podium spot here is being decided in increments, not leaps.
Leclerc’s Monza retirement carried an immediate ranking cost: he dropped two places from third to fifth despite still showing 10 top-10 finishes. This category is unforgiving because retirements simply don’t count, and so a single “R” result can halt momentum while rivals keep adding to their totals.
The contrast inside Ferrari is stark on the numbers available from Italy alone: Hamilton qualified fifth and finished sixth for 8 points across 53 laps, while Leclerc qualified fourth but ended the race classified as retired on lap 1. In a consistency-driven ranking, that swing is the difference between consolidating a lead and losing position in a tightly packed chase group.
Yuki Tsunoda produced the largest movement among the key movers, jumping four places from 23rd to 19th thanks to a 10th-place finish that added a first top-10 finish to his tally. Starting from 17th in qualifying and converting it into a points finish (1 point) was the kind of single, clean addition that can move a driver multiple ranks in the lower half of a season-long table.
Lower down, the cost of having no counted results is reflected in the small but telling slides: Nico Hülkenberg and Lance Stroll both dropped one place, to 20th and 21st respectively, each still on 0 top-10 finishes. As a small piece of race-day context, the Italian Grand Prix had 3 retirements overall — a reminder that simply seeing the chequered flag remains a meaningful competitive advantage in a ranking built around classified top-10s.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yuki Tsunoda | RB F1 Team | 23 | 19 | +4 | 1 |
| Charles Leclerc | Ferrari | 3 | 5 | -2 | 10 |
| George Russell | Mercedes | 4 | 3 | +1 | 10 |
Hamilton’s 13-from-13 consistency keeps him in control of the Most top-10 finishes table, while the battle behind is tightening: Antonelli is on 11 and Russell has reached 10, with small swings — like Leclerc’s retirement — proving costly in a ranking that only rewards classified top-10 conversions.