After eight races, Max Verstappen still leads the 2026 Most overtakes ranking with 50, but the fight behind him tightened again at the Red Bull Ring. Lewis Hamilton re-enters the top 10, while Carlos Sainz’s early retirement coincides with a slide from fourth to eighth.
By Nadia Okafor
The headline at the top of the 2026 Most overtakes table remains familiar after the Austrian Grand Prix: Max Verstappen is still P1 with 50. But the key story of round 8 at the Red Bull Ring isn’t a changing leader — it’s the way the chase pack is tightening and re-ordering while Verstappen’s advantage stays intact.
Verstappen’s lead now has clearer reference points: Gabriel Bortoleto has emerged as the closest rival on 42, and Nico Hülkenberg sits third on 40. That new top three matters because this ranking rewards sustained racecraft across consecutive laps — counting genuine on-track passes and only crediting pit-cycle position swaps when they become lasting strategic gains — so clustering near the front suggests multiple drivers are building repeatable “pass volume,” not just landing one-off spikes.
The Austrian GP itself underlined that breadth. Verstappen finished second from fifth on the grid and scored 18 points, while the ranking lead didn’t change hands; it simply held firm, with the pressure moving elsewhere.
Austria didn’t create a new Most overtakes leader, but it did reshape the podium positions of the ranking: Bortoleto is now second and Hülkenberg third. That’s a meaningful development because it shifts who Verstappen’s closest benchmarks are as the season reaches eight completed races, and it tells you something about who is consistently navigating traffic well enough to rack up the kind of lap-to-lap position changes that survive the methodology’s filters.
It also reinforces the emerging Audi storyline in this metric. Having two drivers in the top three — on 42 and 40 — is a strong signal that, whatever their Sundays look like in points, their season-long passing output is being accumulated at a high rate. In a ranking where retirements don’t generate phantom gains and pit-lane shuffles are largely stripped out, maintaining that sort of tally implies repeated on-track execution rather than statistical noise.
The biggest rise belongs to Franco Colapinto, who jumped five places from 16th to 11th for Alpine, now on 33 overtakes. That stands out because his Austrian GP result was 15th from 16th on the grid, classified Lapped after 70 laps and scoring 0 points — yet the season-long ranking movement shows his passing total is trending upward even without points to show for it.
Lewis Hamilton’s climb is the cleanest top-10 storyline: up four places, from 13th to ninth, with 34 overtakes for Ferrari. That move matters because it flips Hamilton from being a “near miss” into a top-10 presence in the ranking, and it does so while another driver drops out: Liam Lawson falls from 10th to 12th on 32 and is the round’s top-10 exit.
In the other direction, Carlos Sainz’s week is the most costly: down four spots from fourth to eighth with 36 overtakes for Williams. His Austrian GP ended as a retirement after 23 laps from 17th on the grid, and while this ranking doesn’t award overtakes from retirements, it does leave you vulnerable to being overtaken in the table as others continue accumulating passes across full race distances.
At the top, the story is consolidation rather than turnover: Verstappen remains out front on 50 and the lead didn’t change, which points to a sustained baseline of overtaking output across the season’s first eight rounds. But the more dynamic battle is now directly behind him, where Bortoleto (42) and Hülkenberg (40) have established themselves as the nearest reference points.
Further down, the ranking is starting to look like a moving cut line. Hamilton’s return to the top 10 on 34 comes at exactly the moment Lawson slips out on 32, and Colapinto’s surge to 11th on 33 makes ninth-to-12th feel particularly compressed. Meanwhile, Sainz’s fall to eighth despite still holding 36 shows how quickly a strong early-season position can erode when rivals keep adding overtakes race after race.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Franco Colapinto | Alpine F1 Team | 16 | 11 | +5 | 33 |
| Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 13 | 9 | +4 | 34 |
| Carlos Sainz | Williams | 4 | 8 | -4 | 36 |
Verstappen’s 50 overtakes keep him comfortably in control of the ranking, but the story is the closing battle behind: Bortoleto (42) and Hülkenberg (40) have become the clearest threats, while Hamilton’s move to ninth on 34 compresses the fight at the top-10 cutoff with Lawson now 12th on 32.