After Monza, the top of the qualifying teammate duel remains locked on 10–2, but the story moved behind it: Valtteri Bottas jumped four places while Lewis Hamilton and Liam Lawson fell four each and slipped out of the top 10.
By Diego Torres
Max Verstappen remains the reference point in the Teammate head-to-head (qualifying) ranking after round 13 at Monza, still sitting on a 10–2 record for Red Bull. With the top three unchanged, the immediate headline isn’t a changing of the guard but the way the pack behind is compressing and reshuffling around a stable summit.
Verstappen’s nearest company is strikingly symmetrical: Carlos Sainz (Williams) and Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin) also stand on 10–2, second and third respectively. That creates a high bar for anyone trying to break into the elite end of this metric, because catching up is not just about being strong in one Saturday but stacking it repeatedly across sessions where both team-mates set a qualifying position.
The Monza weekend underlined why this measure can diverge from broader narratives: Verstappen qualified sixth and finished third, a reminder that qualifying head-to-heads are their own contest. Even with the Italian Grand Prix won by Andrea Kimi Antonelli, the ranking’s focus remains strictly the intra-team qualifying edge, and Verstappen’s lead in that battle did not change.
The most consequential swing inside the ranking came from Valtteri Bottas, who climbed four places from 15th to 11th for Cadillac F1 Team, now holding a 7–6 record. In a table ordered first by wins and then by win rate, that 7–6 line matters: it’s the difference between hovering in the mid-pack and being within one clean step of the top 10.
Monza also illustrated the separation between what happened on Saturday versus Sunday in this particular lens. Bottas qualified 19th and finished 19th, lapped, scoring 0 points. None of that directly explains his head-to-head movement, because the ranking is built on the sessions where both drivers from the same constructor post qualifying positions; but it does show how a driver can be trending one way in the qualifying duel while having a very different race-day outcome.
Lewis Hamilton and Liam Lawson were the two top-10 exits, and their drops were identical in scale: both fell four positions. Hamilton slid from eighth to 12th for Ferrari and now sits at 6–7, while Lawson fell from 10th to 14th at Red Bull, also at 6–7. In a ranking where the record is displayed as wins–losses, being on the wrong side of .500 is an immediate drag, and both drivers are now chasing rather than consolidating.
Hamilton’s Monza snapshot shows how fine the margins can look on paper even when the weekend outcome appears solid elsewhere: he qualified fifth and finished sixth, taking 8 points. The teammate head-to-head metric, though, doesn’t care about finishing position or points directly — it cares about who ends up ahead within the same car on Saturday. So a respectable qualifying position can still coincide with a loss of ground in the ranking if the comparative picture inside the team is moving the other way across the season.
Lawson’s drop is particularly notable in context because Verstappen’s 10–2 lead stayed fixed. That contrast is the essence of this ranking: one side of a garage can be banking decisive head-to-head outcomes over 13 completed rounds, while the other is fighting a different battle entirely, and the ranking captures that internal spread.
With Hamilton and Lawson out, the top 10 has new faces at the bottom: Arvid Lindblad (RB F1 Team) and Gabriel Bortoleto (Audi) are ninth and 10th, both on 7–6. Lindblad is also a mover in his own right, up two places from 11th to ninth, a reminder that the cut-off for the top 10 is currently defined by narrow, near-even records rather than runaway dominance.
That closeness is reinforced by the negative movement elsewhere: Nico Hülkenberg (Audi) dropped two places from 13th to 15th and is also at 6–7. When multiple drivers are clustered around 7–6 and 6–7, a single additional qualifying head-to-head win can swing several positions, and the ranking’s built-in tie-break logic only kicks in after wins and win rate have done most of the sorting.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Valtteri Bottas | Cadillac F1 Team | 15 | 11 | +4 | 7–6 |
| Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 8 | 12 | -4 | 6–7 |
| Liam Lawson | Red Bull | 10 | 14 | -4 | 6–7 |
The summit is steady — Verstappen, Sainz and Alonso all remain at 10–2 — but the top-10 boundary is tightening around 7–6. Bottas’s jump to 11th puts him within immediate range, while Hamilton and Lawson at 6–7 have work to do just to get back into the top tier of the qualifying teammate duel.