Nine rounds into 2026, the qualifying teammate scoreline has a new pacesetter: Carlos Sainz moves to 7–1 and knocks Max Verstappen off the top. Behind them, Oliver Bearman’s 7–2 surge and fresh top-10 entries for Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris underline how tight this season’s intra-team Saturdays have become.
By Camille Fontaine
Carlos Sainz is the new leader of the Teammate head-to-head (qualifying) ranking after the British Grand Prix, carrying a 7–1 record for Williams. That move matters because it is a genuine change at the top: Max Verstappen was the previous leader, and after Silverstone he drops to third.
Sainz’s headline number is built on consistency rather than any single standout Saturday. At Silverstone he qualified 15th, a reminder that this metric is not about absolute grid position so much as beating the only reference that truly shares your machinery: your team-mate. In a season where small swings add up quickly, 7 wins from 8 comparable qualifying sessions is a powerful platform as the calendar reaches round 9.
Verstappen’s drop from first to third is the clearest signal that the top of this table is being shaped by margins, not runaway dominance. He now sits on 6–2 for Red Bull, a two-place fall that opens the door for a new order even though his overall record remains strong.
The biggest immediate threat is Oliver Bearman, who jumps from fifth to second after Silverstone and is now only separated from the lead on win rate rather than raw volume of wins. Bearman’s 7–2 record for Haas F1 Team gives him more total head-to-head victories than Verstappen, and it illustrates the core dynamic of this ranking: stack enough Saturday ‘wins’ over your team-mate and you can climb even if the wider results narrative elsewhere in the weekend is mixed.
Silverstone also redrew the edges of the top 10. Charles Leclerc is the biggest riser of the weekend, up four places from 13th to ninth with a 5–4 record for Ferrari, and Lando Norris matches that four-place jump from 14th to 10th on the same 5–4 split for McLaren.
Those 5–4 scorelines tell the story: both have crossed into positive territory by the narrowest margin, the kind of incremental shift that becomes decisive in a ranking ordered first by total wins. For Leclerc, the broader weekend was emphatic too: he converted second on the grid into victory from a qualifying position of 2 and 25 points. The head-to-head list doesn’t award points, but it does capture the same theme — a driver turning Saturdays into a repeatable advantage.
Two established names have been pushed out of the top 10 after the British Grand Prix: Nico Hülkenberg and Lewis Hamilton. Hülkenberg’s drop is visible on multiple layers — he slides from eighth to 11th with a 5–4 record for Audi, and his Silverstone weekend ended as Retired after 36 laps, having qualified 13th.
It’s a useful reminder of how this ranking is constructed: it only credits sessions where exactly two drivers from the same constructor set a qualifying position and can be paired, so every comparable Saturday matters. With racesCompleted sitting at 9, the table now has enough sample to reward sustained intra-team edges (Sainz at 7–1; Bearman at 7–2), while the bubble around the top 10 remains sensitive to single-weekend swings — exactly why Leclerc and Norris can jump four places at once, and why Verstappen can be displaced without collapsing statistically.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Charles Leclerc | Ferrari | 13 | 9 | +4 | 5–4 |
| Lando Norris | McLaren | 14 | 10 | +4 | 5–4 |
| Oliver Bearman | Haas F1 Team | 5 | 2 | +3 | 7–2 |
Sainz’s 7–1 puts him in control of the qualifying head-to-head table, but Bearman’s rise to second on 7–2 and Verstappen’s shift to 6–2 show the lead isn’t insulated. With Leclerc and Norris entering the top 10 on 5–4, the next few comparable qualifying sessions could reshuffle the order quickly, especially around the top-three cut line.