F1 Teammate Battles 2026: Qualifying Scores After 17 Rounds

F1 teammate battles 2026 are lopsided on Saturday: across the first 17 rounds, five of the eleven regular pairings have one driver beating the other in qualifying by seven rounds or more, and only three are separated by a single round. Fernando Alonso leads Lance Stroll 13 to 2, Carlos Sainz leads Alexander Albon 13 to 3, and the closest fights sit at Cadillac, Audi and Ferrari, each at 9 to 8. Here is what the GridRaces data says, and where it stops telling the truth.

F1 teammate battles 2026: the qualifying table

The method is simple. For every one of the first 17 rounds of 2026, we compared the final qualifying positions of two drivers in the same car and counted who was ahead. We kept only pairings with at least 13 shared rounds, so mid-season swaps (Red Bull and RB both rearranged their line-ups) do not muddy the picture.

The table below ranks the leader of each pairing by share of rounds won. Read it as a Saturday scoreboard, not a talent ranking.

Who owns Saturday inside their own garage?

Three patterns stand out.

The runaway pairings. Alonso over Stroll at Aston Martin is the widest gap on the grid: 13 rounds to 2 over 15 shared qualifying sessions. Sainz over Albon at Williams is 13 to 3 over 16. Pierre Gasly over Franco Colapinto at Alpine is 13 to 4, and Oliver Bearman over Esteban Ocon at Haas is 12 to 4. In each case one driver is setting the team's ceiling and the other is trying to find it.

The champion's garage. At Mercedes, Andrea Kimi Antonelli leads George Russell 10 to 7 in qualifying. That is a clear edge, but not a crushing one, which fits a championship leader who still has a teammate close enough to matter. At Red Bull, Max Verstappen leads Isack Hadjar 10 to 3 over their 13 shared rounds. At McLaren, Lando Norris leads Oscar Piastri 11 to 6.

The coin flips. Three pairings finish within one round of each other, all at 9 to 8: Charles Leclerc over Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari, Gabriel Bortoleto over Nico Hülkenberg at Audi, and Sergio Pérez over Valtteri Bottas at Cadillac. If you want to know where a team principal's weekly team-orders speech is hardest to write, start there.

Does the Saturday gap survive on Sunday?

Mostly, but not always, and that is the best part of the data. We repeated the count for races where both drivers were classified at the flag.

Antonelli beats Russell 10 to 5 on Sunday, a wider margin than their qualifying split. Verstappen beats Hadjar 9 to 1 across the 10 races both finished. Bearman beats Ocon 10 to 4. At the other end, Hamilton and Leclerc split their 14 shared finishes 7 to 7, so a 9 to 8 qualifying edge for Leclerc turns into a dead heat once the lights go out and the tyres wear.

The most interesting reversal is at Audi. Hülkenberg trails Bortoleto 8 to 9 in qualifying, yet leads him 7 to 4 across the 11 races where both were classified. Saturday says one thing and Sunday says another. If you are choosing which garage to watch for slow-burn drama, that one has our vote.

Lawson is the other case worth flagging. At RB he beats Arvid Lindblad 9 to 5 in qualifying and 9 to 3 in classified finishes. That is a more decisive Sunday margin than almost anyone on the grid outside Red Bull.

The counter-argument: one lap is not a season

Qualifying head-to-head is a blunt tool, and we should say so plainly. A single lap can be ruined by traffic, a red flag, or a mistake that costs one driver a row and the other nothing. Penalties change grid slots after the fact, although the numbers here use final qualifying positions rather than starting grid. Rounds where one driver did not set a time are excluded, so a pairing's total can be 15 or 16 rather than 17.

Race finishes are an even blunter tool. A car retiring from a good position removes that round from the count entirely, which is why the Sunday columns have 9 to 15 shared rounds rather than 17.

There is also the matter of who gets which upgrade, when, and with how much running time to bed it in. None of that is in the table. Where a team has favoured one car, the gap is partly a decision rather than a talent difference, and we cannot see that decision from timing data alone.

Verdict: Saturday gaps are a team story as much as a driver story

Our read: the widest gaps are not just evidence of brilliant drivers. They also describe teams that have built the car around one pair of hands. The narrowest gaps, at Ferrari, Audi and Cadillac, tell you something different: two drivers with similar one-lap speed and cars that do not make either of them look obviously better than the other.

The cleanest bit of context for a title fight is Mercedes. Antonelli's 10 to 7 qualifying edge over Russell means the championship leader has a teammate pushing him every Saturday, and the Sunday split of 10 to 5 shows he has answered it. The next comparison worth running is race pace rather than one-lap speed, and that is what telemetry is for.

If you want to see how this plays out against the championship table, check the standings alongside our Antonelli vs Verstappen front-row comparison and the driver form analysis. For the week's news on one of the closest teammate fights, read our piece on the Pérez Cadillac contract.