Nico Hülkenberg is the new leader of the 2026 Most overtakes ranking on 92, edging ahead of Audi team-mate Gabriel Bortoleto on 87. Sepang also reshuffled the top 10 as Lewis Hamilton and Arvid Lindblad surged in, while Pierre Gasly slid sharply backwards.
By Nadia Okafor
The lead of the 2026 Most overtakes ranking has changed hands, and it’s now an Audi driver at the top for a different reason than last round. Nico Hülkenberg has jumped from third to first, taking the outright lead on 92 overtakes, with Gabriel Bortoleto — the previous leader — demoted to second on 87. That five-overtake margin is small enough to underline how volatile this metric can be, but big enough to feel meaningful with 16 races completed and the season’s busiest stretch already behind the field.
What makes the switch especially striking is that it’s a lead change without a change of teams at the top: Audi remains in control of the ranking’s headline. But the internal order matters. Bortoleto had been setting the pace; now Hülkenberg’s total has forced the reset, and it alters the pressure points for the rest of the season because third place is also right there. Max Verstappen sits third on 86 — just one behind Bortoleto and six behind Hülkenberg — making this less a runaway and more a three-driver squeeze at the front.
The ranking’s top three is unchanged in membership — Hülkenberg, Bortoleto, Verstappen — but the new ordering changes the way you read the table. Hülkenberg’s 92 sets a new reference point, yet Verstappen’s 86 keeps the lead honest: a single race can swing a gap of six in a methodology that credits genuine lap-to-lap passes while stripping out most pit-stop shuffles unless the gain sticks to the finish.
That context is why Bortoleto’s drop to second still looks like strength rather than slippage. On 87, he remains the closest pursuer, and with Verstappen at 86 the margin for error is minimal — especially when the tie-breakers (points, then alphabetically) sit in the background for the inevitable clusters that form in a stat like this.
Sepang’s biggest visible shift was lower down, where two big gainers forced their way into the top 10. Lewis Hamilton vaulted from 14th to eighth, a six-place jump that leaves him level on 75 overtakes — a reminder that a driver can surge in this ranking even when their season narrative elsewhere is about results. Arvid Lindblad made a similarly emphatic statement, climbing from 15th to 10th, up five places and also landing on 75.
Those moves came with collateral damage. Carlos Sainz and Liam Lawson have fallen out of the top 10 entirely, a notable swing considering Sainz still sits just outside it in 12th on 74 — one overtake away from Hamilton and Lindblad’s shared total. The table now has a compressed top-10 cut line: 75 gets you eighth or 10th, 74 leaves you 12th, and the next data-set could flip that picture again.
Pierre Gasly’s slide is the clearest example of how quickly this ranking can punish a quiet weekend. He has dropped six places from 12th to 18th, and despite still sitting on 67 overtakes he’s now well removed from the top-10 conversation. George Russell also moved the wrong way, slipping from fifth to seventh, and he’s part of the same 75-overtake cluster now occupied by Hamilton and Lindblad — a sign of how congested the midfield of this ranking has become.
If you want one piece of race-day colour that fits the theme, Sepang produced a biggest mover of the entire field: Lindblad gained 12 places from grid to finish. That doesn’t automatically translate to overtakes as defined here, but it aligns with why he’s suddenly a top-10 presence in a ranking built to isolate real on-track position changes rather than pit-lane noise.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 14 | 8 | +6 | 75 |
| Pierre Gasly | Alpine F1 Team | 12 | 18 | -6 | 67 |
| Arvid Lindblad | RB F1 Team | 15 | 10 | +5 | 75 |
Hülkenberg’s move to 92 overtakes turns an Audi one-two into a genuine internal fight, with Bortoleto only five back on 87 and Verstappen one behind him on 86. The more immediate pressure point is the top-10 threshold: Hamilton and Lindblad have raised it to 75, leaving Sainz on 74 vulnerable to the next swing in a tightly packed mid-table.