LONG READ · 2026 SEASON
Mercedes are running away with 2026, but the real season is behind them
Five rounds in, the constructors' standings tell three separate stories: a team that has won everything, a fight for second that hinges on reliability, and a champion struggling to locate his old form.
The first five rounds of 2026 have produced exactly one winner. Not one dominant team, not one driver in imperious form: literally one winner, across every grand prix, every pole position, every front row. Mercedes have converted the regulation reset into something close to total control, and the championship table reflects it. Antonelli leads on 131 points, Russell sits second on 88, and the rest of the field is competing for whatever scraps the silver cars leave behind.
That framing is not entirely fair to the teams in positions two through eleven. There is a real, meaningful contest happening beneath Mercedes. Ferrari and McLaren are separated by 41 points in the constructors’ standings, a gap that reflects genuine differences in reliability and consistency rather than raw pace. Verstappen has a podium to his name and has shown flashes of the old Red Bull speed. The midfield is close enough that a single retirement reshuffles the order. But any honest reading of the data has to start with what Mercedes have done, because it shapes everything else.
The Mercedes machine
When a team wins the opening round of a season, it is a signal. When it wins all five, with front-row lockouts at each race, it is a statement about the gap between its car and the rest of the field.
Mercedes have started every 2026 grand prix with both drivers on the front row. Russell took pole in Australia and converted it into the win. Antonelli then claimed pole at China, Japan, Miami, and Canada, winning all four. No other constructor has put a car on the front row across these five rounds. That is not a run of form; it is structural superiority.
The constructors’ totals underline the point. After Australia, Mercedes had 43 constructor points from a 1-2 finish. By the end of Canada, that had grown to 219, with Ferrari second on 147 and McLaren third on 106. The gap to Ferrari alone is 72 points after just five rounds. In a season that typically runs to 24 or more grands prix, that is a significant cushion built before the calendar has even reached Europe properly.
What makes the Mercedes advantage so difficult for rivals to claw back is its consistency. They have not simply scored heavily in favourable conditions: they have dominated clean races, sprint weekends, and mixed-order events alike. The only blemish was Russell’s retirement in Canada, which cost him points he would otherwise have collected comfortably. Even with that zero on the board, the team’s total stands 72 clear of Ferrari.
The front-row lockout is perhaps the most telling single statistic. When both of your cars consistently start 1st and 2nd, you remove the strategic complexity that allows rivals to attack. You control pit-stop windows, safety car restarts, and tyre choice. You do not need to be aggressive because you are already ahead. This is what dominance looks like in the data: not just winning, but removing the conditions under which you might not win.
It is worth noting what the 2026 regulations were designed to achieve. The overhaul was intended to close the field, bring new entrants into the mix, and prevent the kind of single-team domination that had characterised recent cycles. Through five rounds, the dominant team simply changed. The convergence question remains open for later in the season, but the early evidence suggests Mercedes solved the new rules faster than anyone else.
Antonelli and Russell: two very different seasons inside one garage
The Mercedes story has an internal tension that the headlines about front-row lockouts tend to obscure. Antonelli and Russell are both winning and scoring for the same team, but they are having very different seasons.
Antonelli’s record in grand prix trim is almost absurd. An average finishing position of 1.2 from five starts, with four wins, means he has finished outside the top 2 only once: second in Australia when Russell led a 1-2. His average grid position of 1.4 reflects the four poles in a row. He has scored 118 points from race results alone, not counting sprint weekends. For a driver in his second full season, this is a performance profile that invites serious long-term questions about what his ceiling is.
Russell’s season tells a different story. His average race finishing position is 6.0, inflated substantially by the Canada retirement and fourth-place finishes in Japan and Miami. His race points total of 67 is solid for a driver on any other team, but against a team-mate scoring at Antonelli’s rate, it creates a gap that compounds round by round.
The sprint format has been Russell’s saving grace. Across the three sprint weekends so far, Russell has collected 21 sprint points: he won the China sprint from pole, finished 4th in Miami, and won the Canada sprint again. Antonelli has taken 13 sprint points across those same three weekends. That 8-point sprint advantage is the reason the overall gap between them is 43 points rather than something larger.
The structural problem for Russell is that sprint points are capped. Each sprint weekend offers a maximum of 8 points for the sprint winner, against 25 for a race win. Antonelli’s race-day dominance accumulates faster than sprint bonuses can compensate for. If Antonelli continues converting poles into wins at his current rate, the sprint advantage will shrink in proportional terms as the season progresses.
The Canada weekend illustrated the intra-team dynamic sharply. Russell started from pole, led the opening laps, and then retired. Antonelli, starting 2nd, inherited the lead and won. The same pattern that has defined the season: Russell competitive in qualifying trim, Antonelli ruthless when it matters on Sunday.
None of this diminishes Russell’s contribution to the constructors’ championship. His 67 race points and 21 sprint points are scoring that Ferrari’s second driver can only envy. But the drivers’ title is beginning to look like Antonelli’s to lose, and at 1.2 average finishes, he is not making many mistakes.
Ferrari versus McLaren: consistency against pace
The constructors’ battle for second place is the most interesting analytical puzzle of the season so far. Ferrari lead McLaren by 41 points, but the gap is built on a platform that McLaren have the raw pace to challenge. The question is whether they can translate that pace into consistent results.
Ferrari’s advantage is structural: both drivers score points in almost every race. Leclerc has an average finishing position of 4.4 across five rounds. Hamilton, in his first season with the team, averages 4.2. Their results by round tell the consistency story clearly: Leclerc finished 3rd, 4th, 3rd, 8th, and 4th. Hamilton finished 4th, 3rd, 6th, 6th, and 2nd. Neither driver has a zero on the race-points board, and they are separated in the overall standings by just 3 points (Leclerc 75, Hamilton 72). That is the most evenly matched Ferrari pairing in recent memory, and from a constructors’ perspective, it is enormously valuable.
The Hamilton 2nd place in Canada is worth noting. Starting from 5th, he worked his way through to finish behind only Antonelli, taking 18 race points. It was the kind of performance that suggests the pace is there; the challenge has been converting front-grid starts into podiums rather than mid-points finishes.
McLaren’s story is more volatile. The China weekend was lost entirely in race trim: both Norris and Piastri did not start the grand prix, taking only sprint points from that round. That single weekend cost McLaren a potential haul of race points that would have kept them closer to Ferrari in the constructors’ standings.
When McLaren have started cleanly, they have been quick. Japan was their best race result: Piastri finished 2nd for 18 points, Norris 5th for 10 points. Miami was similarly strong: Norris 2nd for 18 points, Piastri 3rd for 15 points. But Canada unravelled again, with Norris retiring and Piastri finishing 11th and lapped. The pattern is a team with genuine race pace undone by reliability and incidents on the wrong weekends.
Norris’s season numbers show the cost of the inconsistency. He has an average race finishing position of 10.0 and has accumulated 58 total points (including sprint points). His one race podium is the 2nd place in Miami. Piastri has two race podiums, the 2nd in Japan and 3rd in Miami, but an average finishing position of 11.2 and 48 total points. Both McLaren drivers sit above Verstappen in the standings purely because of their strong races in Japan and Miami, but the aggregate is far below what their raw speed on those weekends would suggest was achievable.
Ferrari’s advantage over McLaren going forward may be more fragile than the 41-point gap implies. If McLaren can address the reliability picture and extract their obvious race pace across a full run of rounds, the gap is closable. Ferrari, for their part, have yet to win a race this season. Leclerc and Hamilton are consistently in the top 5 but not yet threatening Antonelli on Sundays. The team with the best shot at breaking Mercedes’ winning streak may actually be McLaren on a day when both cars finish cleanly, but they need to string those days together.
Verstappen, the midfield, and what the standings reveal
The most curious subplot of the 2026 season belongs to Verstappen. He sits 7th in the drivers’ standings with 43 points and no wins, which would read as a quiet, underperforming season for any other driver. The context makes it more interesting.
His Australia result was 6th, starting from 20th: a substantial recovery drive that produced 8 points from a compromised grid slot. China ended in retirement. Japan was 8th from 11th on the grid. Miami was his best race of the season, 5th from 2nd, which represents a genuine pace deficit to the cars ahead. Canada was his first podium: 3rd from 6th, a clean race on a weekend when others ahead of him had problems.
The average grid position of 9.4 is the telling number. Red Bull have not been qualifying the car at the front, and Verstappen’s results reflect that constraint more than any deficit in his driving. When he starts near the front, as in Miami, he finishes near the front. The race average of 7.6 reflects several weekends where grid position limited what was possible.
Red Bull’s 57 constructor points put them 4th, 49 behind McLaren and 90 behind Ferrari. They are not in the fight for second place yet, but Canada showed the car is capable of front-running pace in the right conditions. Verstappen’s podium came with Hadjar also finishing 5th: a 3-5 from 6th and 7th on the grid is a decent return.
The midfield behind Red Bull is genuinely competitive. Alpine sit on 35 constructor points, built from consistent if unspectacular results from both Gasly (20 points) and Colapinto (15 points). Gasly’s average grid of 10.2 and Colapinto’s 12.2 suggest the Alpine is qualifying solidly for its position in the order and then holding station in races rather than attacking.
Racing Bulls have 21 constructor points, largely from Lawson (16 points). Haas have 19 points, almost all from Bearman (18 points), who has been the season’s standout midfield performer: an average qualifying position of 13.6 with race points in four of five rounds is genuine extraction from a car that should not be scoring as consistently.
Williams are on 7 constructor points, Audi on 2. Cadillac and Aston Martin have yet to trouble the scorers, with Aston Martin in particular failing to register a single championship point across five rounds despite fielding two experienced drivers. It represents a difficult start to what was supposed to be a competitive 2026 campaign.
The structural picture the standings reveal after five rounds is this: Mercedes have a problem that only time and development will solve for rivals. Behind them, Ferrari have built their lead through reliability; McLaren have the pace to close it but not yet the consistency; and Red Bull are waiting for the car to unlock rather than being written out of the season entirely.
What changes this picture? A Mercedes reliability failure, which Russell’s Canada retirement shows is possible. A McLaren run of clean weekends, which Japan and Miami showed they are capable of. A Ferrari qualifying breakthrough that gets Leclerc or Hamilton onto the front row. None of those are unlikely over the next fifteen rounds; the question is which team converts its individual flashes into a consistent threat.
The 2026 championship may look like a foregone conclusion at the top. But the gap between finishing positions 2 through 7 is tight enough that the season behind Antonelli is very much alive.
Mercedes have won every race and show no sign of stopping: the contest is who finishes second, and that is a real fight.