George Russell’s Azerbaijan GP weekend flips the top of the Best qualifying average table, edging Mercedes team-mate Andrea Kimi Antonelli. Charles Leclerc and Oscar Piastri also make one-place gains as the fight behind tightens.
By Julian Reyes
George Russell now sits first in 2026’s Best qualifying average ranking after the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, moving from second to first with a 3.00 mean qualifying position. The swing is small in movement but significant in context: it dislodges the previous leader, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, and it’s built on the kind of Saturday that this metric is designed to reward.
Baku delivered Russell’s most emphatic single-session leverage possible in this format: pole position. With Russell qualifying 1st and Antonelli only 16th, the intra-Mercedes split was stark, and because the ranking is a mean across every qualifying session entered (with the full field counted), that disparity matters even across a 15-round sample. The result is a new 1-2 for Mercedes on the table, Russell on 3.00 from Antonelli on 3.27.
This ranking rarely changes hands without a weekend that cleanly separates the front-runners, and Azerbaijan did exactly that. Antonelli’s 16th-place qualifying position was the kind of outlier that drags an average upward quickly, while Russell’s 1st-place effort pulls his in the opposite direction. The gap between 3.00 and 3.27 reads slim, but it’s now the difference between leading the category and chasing it.
There’s also an important reminder in the contrast between the metric and the Sunday story: Antonelli recovered to finish 5th and score 10 points, while Russell converted pole into victory for 25 points over 51 laps. That race outcome doesn’t directly affect a qualifying-average ranking, but it underlines why consistently starting near the front is such a powerful foundation: when Russell is first on Saturday, his weekends become simpler to control, and his ranking reflects that underlying repeatability.
The top three itself didn’t change, but the pressure behind it did. Lewis Hamilton remains third with a 4.40 average, yet the mid-table of contenders is compressing around him, led by a Ferrari gain elsewhere: Charles Leclerc climbed from fifth to fourth and now sits on 4.40 as well. With the methodology’s tie-breaks based on season points and then alphabetical order, matching a headline number isn’t the same as being equal in the classification—and it makes every single qualifying slot feel expensive.
McLaren has movement too. Oscar Piastri rose from seventh to sixth with a 5.47 average, while his team-mate Lando Norris slipped from fourth to fifth on 4.53. That combination matters because it redraws the shape of the group chasing the podium places in this ranking: Leclerc steps nearer to Hamilton’s territory, Norris gives up ground, and Piastri edges into a slightly more favourable position for the run-in.
Max Verstappen’s one-place loss—from sixth to seventh on 5.57—adds to that theme: gains and losses are capped at single positions this week, but the knock-on effect is meaningful because so many drivers are clustered by tenths of a place in average qualifying position. With 15 races completed, the table is now less about dramatic leaps and more about who avoids the occasional qualifying collapse that inflates an average for weeks.
The immediate takeaway is that the lead is now defined by a Mercedes internal duel: Russell at 3.00, Antonelli at 3.27. That’s close enough that one more sharply contrasting Saturday can swap them again, especially given how heavily a 1st versus a 16th can tug at the mean in opposite directions.
Behind them, Hamilton’s 4.40 looks less like a comfortable third place and more like a number that can be crowded quickly. Leclerc is already on 4.40 after his move to fourth, and Norris’s 4.53 keeps McLaren in striking distance if it steadies its Saturdays. In a ranking built on accumulation rather than highlight reels, the next story is whether Baku was an anomaly for Antonelli—or the kind of qualifying swing that keeps this table volatile at the very top.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| George Russell | Mercedes | 2 | 1 | +1 | 3.00 |
| Charles Leclerc | Ferrari | 5 | 4 | +1 | 4.40 |
| Oscar Piastri | McLaren | 7 | 6 | +1 | 5.47 |
Russell’s move to 3.00 gives him a narrow buffer over Antonelli’s 3.27 at the top, but the margin is small enough that another split weekend could flip the lead again. With Hamilton still third on 4.40 and Leclerc now also on 4.40 in fourth, the next few qualifying sessions will decide whether third stays stable or becomes the next position to be squeezed.