After the Belgian Grand Prix, Carlos Sainz remains the benchmark in 2026’s qualifying teammate duel, but the biggest change came behind: Gabriel Bortoleto’s jump and a double slide for Liam Lawson and Sergio Pérez tightened a crowded mid-table.
By Camille Fontaine
Carlos Sainz leaves Spa still leading the 2026 Teammate head-to-head (qualifying) ranking, his Williams record sitting at 8–1 after 10 rounds. That matters because the metric rewards repeated Saturday execution over one-off peaks: each session is a simple win or loss against the only driver in the same car who set a classified position, and Sainz’s 8 wins underline a season-long edge rather than a single standout weekend.
The top three is unchanged, which is its own story. Oliver Bearman stays second on 8–2 for Haas F1 Team and Max Verstappen remains third on 7–2 for Red Bull, meaning Spa didn’t produce the kind of swing that breaks open the front of the table. Instead, it reinforced the pattern flagged by the data: the lead is being consolidated, while the turbulence is concentrated just below the podium places.
The sharpest rise belongs to Gabriel Bortoleto, who climbed four places from 15th to 11th for Audi with a perfectly balanced 5–5 record. In a ranking ordered by total head-to-head wins first, then win rate, that .500 line is significant: it signals Bortoleto is no longer bleeding ground in qualifying sessions and is instead banking enough wins to threaten the top 10 if he can turn parity into a positive margin.
The flip side is that two drivers both lost three places, and both did it with the same underlying record: Liam Lawson dropped from sixth to ninth at RB F1 Team on 6–4, while Sergio Pérez slid from seventh to 10th for Cadillac F1 Team, also on 6–4. With identical win-loss lines producing different ranks, Spa highlighted how tight this portion of the table is — small changes in wins can send drivers skidding even when their overall hit-rate still looks healthy.
Spa offered a reminder that this is a qualifying-only lens — and it can paint a different picture to Sunday. Bortoleto qualified ninth and went on to finish eighth, scoring 4 points after starting eighth, an all-around tidy weekend that fits the idea of a driver stabilising. Lawson qualified 11th and finished 12th from ninth on the grid, leaving with 0 points; whatever the wider context, the ranking only cares that his season-long head-to-head now sits at 6–4 and, crucially, that the ranking position fell to ninth.
Sainz, the ranking leader, is the counter-example: he qualified 15th and finished 16th after starting 19th, scoring 0 points — yet his 8–1 teammate-qualifying record keeps him out front because the framework is about beating the other Williams in sessions where both set a position. That split is why this table is useful: it isolates one of the sport’s most repeatable skills and shows where drivers are building an advantage that can matter even when race results don’t flatter them.
Two smaller upward moves are worth noting because they speak to how quickly this ranking can evolve once the margins tighten. Andrea Kimi Antonelli rose two spots from eighth to sixth for Mercedes, and Charles Leclerc climbed two places from ninth to seventh for Ferrari; both sit on 6–4. When multiple drivers share the same record line, position becomes fragile: a single additional qualifying win can separate a driver from a cluster, while a single loss can drop them back into it.
There was movement the other way too. Nico Hülkenberg slipped one place from 11th to 12th for Audi on 5–5, which, paired with Bortoleto’s surge to 11th on the same 5–5 record, hints at an increasingly fine internal and external battle around the midfield of this metric. With the maximum movement magnitude at Spa being four places, the weekend didn’t rewrite the hierarchy at the top — but it did compress the group trying to break into the upper tier.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gabriel Bortoleto | Audi | 15 | 11 | +4 | 5–5 |
| Liam Lawson | RB F1 Team | 6 | 9 | -3 | 6–4 |
| Sergio Pérez | Cadillac F1 Team | 7 | 10 | -3 | 6–4 |
Sainz’s 8–1 keeps the bar high in the 2026 qualifying teammate duel, but Spa’s real consequence is compression behind him: Bortoleto reaching 11th at 5–5 while Lawson and Pérez fall to ninth and 10th (both 6–4) makes the next few qualifying sessions pivotal for anyone chasing the top three.