Two races into 2026, the Most overtakes ranking is already volatile: Max Verstappen stays P1 on 19 despite retiring in Shanghai, while Lando Norris and Gabriel Bortoleto drop out of the top 10 entirely.
By Elena Marsh
Max Verstappen remains the benchmark in the 2026 Most overtakes ranking after the Chinese Grand Prix, holding P1 with 19. The headline is that the lead didn’t change even though Verstappen’s Shanghai weekend ended early — he started 8th, retired after 45 laps, and scored 0 points — a reminder that this table is tracking a season’s worth of genuine passes rather than a single-race result.
Behind him, the chase is tight and suddenly reshuffled. Oliver Bearman is P2 on 15 and Liam Lawson is P3 on 15, meaning Verstappen’s margin is four overtakes over both. With only two races completed, that’s a meaningful cushion, but it is not a comfortable one if the next rounds generate another wave of high-volume passing from the pack.
The biggest movers were brutal in both directions, with an 11-place swing the maximum movement magnitude. Lando Norris fell from P2 to P13 with 7 overtakes and Gabriel Bortoleto dropped from P3 to P14, also on 7. Whatever Norris and Bortoleto built across the opening two rounds is now a mid-table count, and the damage is amplified by the tie-break structure: once drivers converge around similar totals, rank can shift sharply as new data lands.
Isack Hadjar was the counterpoint: up eight places from P19 to P11 with 9 overtakes, turning Shanghai into a platform rather than a footnote. He qualified 9th, finished 8th, ran all 56 laps and scored 4 points — and that completeness matters in this metric, because overtakes are only counted while both cars are still running and races without lap-chart data are excluded rather than estimated.
There was churn at the cut line too. Nico Hülkenberg (Audi) sits P4 on 12, Carlos Sainz (Williams) has surged to P5 on 11, and Esteban Ocon (Haas) is now P7 on 10. Meanwhile Norris, Bortoleto and Andrea Kimi Antonelli are listed as the top-10 exits, underlining how quickly a ‘top-three’ start can turn into a recovery job when the pass-count rhythm changes.
The most interesting tension in this ranking isn’t only at the top; it’s the compression just behind it. Sainz jumped seven spots from P12 to P5 and now sits on 11 overtakes, placing him one behind Hülkenberg and four behind the joint P2 total. That is the profile of a driver who doesn’t need a miraculous spike to threaten the podium places in the table — he needs a steady continuation.
Ocon’s six-place rise from P13 to P7 is similar in shape but still significant: 10 overtakes has him within a single pass of Sainz and only five off Bearman and Lawson. And with Bearman and Ocon both representing Haas in the top seven, there’s an emerging intra-team subplot inside a ranking that tends to highlight track position battles rather than headline results.
This Most overtakes ranking is built from the full lap-by-lap position chart, crediting a driver when they are behind at the end of one lap and ahead at the end of the next — and stripping out pit-stop shuffles unless the strategic gain sticks all the way to the finish. That makes it sensitive to the kinds of races where drivers are repeatedly swapping places on track, but also strict about not awarding ‘free’ passes from retirements or timing quirks.
In a two-race sample, that strictness can make the table look unforgiving: a non-start like Norris’s in Shanghai (grid 6, did not start, 0 laps) can’t create overtakes, and a retirement like Verstappen’s (45 laps) caps the opportunity to add to an already-strong base. The net effect is a ranking that rewards sustained, race-long involvement in battles — and punishes lost mileage immediately.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lando Norris | McLaren | 2 | 13 | -11 | 7 |
| Gabriel Bortoleto | Audi | 3 | 14 | -11 | 7 |
| Isack Hadjar | Red Bull | 19 | 11 | +8 | 9 |
Verstappen’s 19-overtake lead is intact, but the gap to Bearman and Lawson is only four, while the mid-table is tightly packed around 9–12. With Norris and Bortoleto now down at 7, the next clean, full-distance race could flip the top-10 picture again without requiring anyone to catch P1 immediately.