Qualifying
Saturday performance judged against the machinery’s baseline, not the stopwatch alone. A midfield car dragged into places it doesn’t belong scores higher than a rocket ship parked on pole.
This season, Fernando Alonso leads Qualifying: 9.71 against the grid, across 12 rated races. The single best Qualifying performance of the year belongs to Valtteri Bottas — 10.0 at the SHA.
How the grid reads on Qualifying in 2026
what the season table actually saysAt the top. Fernando Alonso leads Qualifying on 9.71, 0.40 clear of Carlos Sainz on 9.32. 23 drivers have enough running to be rated, and the field runs from 9.71 down to 6.00 — a spread of 3.71 of a grade point.
The speciality. Arvid Lindblad is P9 on Qualifying but only P21 on The Index overall — 12 places better here than at everything else put together. On this one measure, this is what they are for.
The soft spot. Lewis Hamilton runs the other way: P5 on The Index but only P15 here, 10 places worse. A driver good enough to rank high overall is giving something back on qualifying.
Same car, same measure. Team mates share machinery, so the gap between them is as close to a clean read as qualifying gets. The tightest pair on the grid is Cadillac — Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez separated by just 0.15. The widest is Aston Martin, where Fernando Alonso is 3.42 ahead of Lance Stroll.
What this number is not. Qualifying is one of nine independent measures, and a driver can lead it while sitting mid-table overall — the season grade in the last column is this metric alone, not a summary of the driver. It is also a rating against the rest of the grid this season, not against history: it says who is doing this best right now, not who has ever done it best.
Season ranking
click a round to sort · each round on its own, Season against the grid| Pos | Driver | MEL | SHA | SUZ | MIA | CAN | MON | ESP | AUT | GBR | SPA | HUN | NED | ITA | Season |
|---|
A race grade rates one afternoon; a season grade rates a driver across the year against the rest of the grid. They answer different questions, so they are not versions of the same number and the season figure is not the row added up. – = not classified that race (insufficient running, or the situation made the metric unmeasurable — the driver is never penalised for it), and never counted towards the season; the championship still accumulates per-race points.