– Kimi Antonelli still has to wait for his first victory with us. While the Italian already secured his fourth consecutive Grand Prix win in Canada, he again only finished third in the driver ratings from Motorsport-Total.com and is still waiting for his first triumph.
Read more Mick Schumacher at the Indy 500: Perhaps a bit too reserved at the start
While Antonelli again received the best reader rating (1.64), he finished in the overall ranking with a score of 1.88 behind his teammate George Russell (1.73) and Lewis Hamilton (1.63), who thus won the daily ranking in Montreal.
For Hamilton, it is the first win in the driver ratings since the Belgian Grand Prix 2024, when he was still racing for Mercedes. The decisive factor for his success this time were the ratings from our expert Marc Surer.
While Hamilton, Russell, and Antonelli all received a 2 from the editorial team, Surer gave Hamilton and Russell a 1 – which allowed them to surpass Antonelli in the final tally. Record world champion Hamilton was seen in Canada “once again in his old form,” according to our expert.
Russell meanwhile received praise for “Sprint win, pole position, and leading in the Grand Prix.” Antonelli, on the other hand, according to Surer, “complained a bit too much on the radio to get a 1.” The editorial team also attributed some mistakes to him in the sprint and race.
Neck-and-neck race in the overall standings
In the fifth Grand Prix of the year, Montreal already saw the fifth different daily winner in our ratings. After Russell (Australia), Oliver Bearman (China), Oscar Piastri (Japan), and most recently Franco Colapinto (Miami), a Ferrari driver triumphed for the first time this year.
However, several top drivers disappointed this weekend. While world champion Lando Norris (overall rating 2.46) at least scored points as eighth, Charles Leclerc (3.12) missed the top 10 and thus the points positions as twelfth.
Oscar Piastri (4.42) was even among the worst drivers this weekend. He finished only 21st and second to last after crashing into Alexander Albon during the race. The editorial team gave him a 5 for this.
For our expert, Valtteri Bottas was the worst driver. The Finn was the only driver to receive a 5 from Surer. In the overall ranking, the Cadillac driver also finished last with an overall rating of 4.80. For the readers, Lance Stroll was the worst driver at his home race (reader rating 4.54).
Read more Russell praises new regulations — Wolff wants to «dissect with a scalpel»
In the overall rating, there is currently a neck-and-neck race between the two Mercedes drivers. Antonelli and Russell each have 61 points after the first five races. Hamilton has moved up to 57 points and thus to P3 immediately behind the Mercedes duo with his win in Canada.
Click through: How Surer rates the 22 drivers!
How Marc Surer rates the other drivers can be read in detail in an extended photo gallery. In this photo gallery, both the Formula 1 expert and the editorial team explain their ratings for each of the 22 drivers individually. So that users can hopefully better understand how the driver ratings came about from now on.
Photo gallery: Montreal: The driver ratings from Marc Surer and the editorial team
By the way: Many users want more transparency from the editorial team regarding the awarding of ratings. That is why we have decided to also publish the individual ratings of our editors in a separate table. For the overall editorial rating, which forms pillar 3 of the system, the editorial team agrees on a common full rating in a conference.
In this conference, which has become a fixed program item for us every Monday morning after Formula 1, things sometimes get heated when different opinions clash. And we collect arguments that speak for or against a better or worse rating.
How we award our ratings
The idea behind our rating system is to evaluate performances over a weekend and especially in the race with ratings (1 = very good, 6 = insufficient). External influences that the drivers cannot control themselves should be excluded. And so that not only the editorial team subjectively rates, as is the case with football magazines, we have created three equal pillars with the readers and the expert.
And this is how we calculate:
From the average rating of Motorsport-Total.com users, the rating by expert Marc Surer, and the rating by our editorial team, we calculate the average. Our driver ranking results from this average value. We only display one decimal place, but for the calculation, we use all decimal places. These partially invisible decimal places determine the order of the ranking of two drivers in the case of an apparent rating tie.
The ratings of the individual editors:
We are often asked how our editorial ratings come about. All editors of our Formula 1 team first give their ratings individually. In an editorial conference on the morning after the Grand Prix, we then discuss and agree on common editorial ratings, which usually (but not always) reflect the average of the individual editors’ ratings. Sometimes the discussion about setting the editorial ratings gets heated. The goal is to agree on common driver ratings that every editor can accept.
Award for Driver of the Year:
Based on the overall ratings of a race weekend, we award points for the 2026 annual ranking. Similar to the points system in the real Formula 1 World Championship, the winner receives 25 points, the second 18, the third 15 – down to one point for tenth place. There is no bonus point for the fastest lap. At the end of the season, the driver with the most points is awarded the Motorsport-Total.com Award for Driver of the Year 2026.
Read more “Couldn’t shake you off”: Hamilton-Verstappen chat goes viral
