Winners and losers from US GP F1 qualifying 2026

What looked like a wide open Formula 1 qualifying session at the United States Grand Prix - or perhaps even one where Ferrari was clear favourite - somehow ended up with the runaway championship leader on pole.

Which means plenty of disappointed people in our winners and losers selection.

Loser: Ferrari (4th & 5th)

Yet again in 2026, Ferrari falters when it actually counts. That clean sweep of fastest practice times looked so convincing, and yet given it's this team, there was still that element of doubt. Would Ferrari and/or its drivers somehow fumble qualifying? Would something go tactically wrong?

In the end, it just wasn't quick enough in qualifying trim - rivals able to exploit deployment possibilities much better, and Charles Leclerc ruing poor tyre prep too.

And this doesn't seem like a case where qualifying will be the blip and there's loads of untapped race pace in store for Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton to charge forward with.

This Ferrari might just be better at looking quick in the sessions that don't actually matter. - Matt Beer

Winner: Kimi Antonelli (1st)

In the weeks where his coronation as a remarkably young F1 world champion has looked ever more secure, Antonelli has actually been keeping a relatively low profile on track, unable to work his usual magic amid the confusion around Mercedes' upgrade.

So despite the fact he's on the cusp of sealing the title with multiple (who really knows how many) races to spare, Antonelli's pole here feels slightly out of the blue.

But it's not inherited through others blowing it - he was quickest when he needed to be and there's every chance he can seal the title with a win on Sunday. - MB

Loser: George Russell (6th)

After lapping more than four tenths of a second off his (polesitting) Mercedes team-mate, George Russell can probably count himself fortunate to be sixth considering the pace of Lando Norris's track-limits-hindered McLaren.

Russell put the gulf to Antonelli down to "one slide" on his first run, which happened at the Turn 11 hairpin and meant the time-loss effect was "just a snowball" from there, and then cited cloud cover late in Q3 as the reason why so few were able to improve on their final runs.

What might haunt Russell is that he was just 0.027s off Antonelli in the preceding session - it's just when it mattered most that the laptime bled away.

So it's not the galling result it might look like, but it certainly was underwhelming. "From my side, it's two bad laps in Q3, as simple as that really," he said. - Jack Cozens

Winner: Isack Hadjar (3rd)

A practice-to-qualifying turnaround (in a good way) only beaten by Ferrari's (less-than-positive) slide from contention.

Hadjar had been all at sea on Friday - calling his tyre deg in the high-speed corners "disgusting" in FP2 - and was still a lowly ninth, close to nine tenths down on team-mate Max Verstappen, in an FP3 session where he also bizarrely accused Alex Albon of impeding him despite only being near the Williams because he'd slid towards it while making a mistake.

Anyway. Hadjar's tendency for hyperbole on the team radio can often be followed by great things. Come qualifying, he was right on it.

It's one thing to ask Verstappen to progress through the first two parts of qualifying on one set of tyres, but quite another to expect his team-mate to do so too. Hadjar passed that test convincingly - another sign that Red Bull finally has a dependable performer in its second seat.

The only downside? Hadjar's ideal lap was actually marginally faster than Verstappen's. - JC

Loser: McLaren (7th & 8th)

Both drivers picked up once again on the theme of Friday practice - that the McLaren is a properly quick car underneath it all, but that performance is just too difficult to access readily.

Norris had moments where he looked like a genuine threat for pole, and others where he was absolutely nowhere near the pace - sometimes from run to run, never mind session to session.

He set the outright pace in Q1 (albeit with two runs), was fifth in Q2 but half a second off that Q1 time, then only eighth in Q3 following a track-limits violation, with his legal lap slightly slower than he went in Q1.

He called the McLaren "insanely difficult to drive; probably the hardest car I've ever had to drive in my life" and said "it's an impossible car to achieve the perfection that I want to achieve at the minute. 

"Which is a struggle, because I want to go for pole and I need to tell myself to settle for a P5 and I don't want to do that."

Oscar Piastri's qualifying was more normal and more linear, in that he found time in each of the three segments, but he was still nearly eight tenths off the pace - and the McLarens were cut adrift of the other 'big four' teams in Q3.

"It's been tough from lap one to be honest," he said. "Just trying to get performance out of the car has been very, very challenging. 

"I think at points in qualifying, for Lando at least, it looked like there was potential in it and I think we both felt there is potential in it, but the difference of extracting that potential or not is like half a second. 

"It's been very, very tough to get that laptime out of the car. I've not managed it at all, but I think when either of us have really pushed the boundaries we can't keep it on the track." - Ben Anderson

Winner: Racing Bulls (9th & 10th)

Definitely a winner, as the only midfield team to make Q3 up against stiff competition from Audi (which probably underperformed slightly in Q2) and Pierre Gasly (who seemed to drag the maximum from his Alpine by winding up 11th, 0.022s shy of Liam Lawson in Q2).

At such a technical track, that definitely counts for something too when judging how good a car Racing Bulls has built and developed.

But: we're also marking Racing Bulls down for its flagrant decision to park Lawson in Q3 to allow Arvid Lindblad, saddled with a five-place grid penalty for a sixth internal combustion engine, to qualify ahead (and drop back one place fewer) with no midfield competition to contend with.

Lawson - who'd saved two sets of softs for Q3 - said he asked to go out but understood the team's decision, which had been made before qualifying. And for the record, we do too: Racing Bulls has a constructors' championship battle to win and wants to have the best shot possible at scoring points with both cars.

But it's still a decision that doesn't sit particularly comfortably. Especially considering the hundreds of thousands of paying spectators who made the trip to Austin, regardless of just how short-changed they'll feel at seeing one fewer Racing Bulls than they should have in Q3. - JC

Loser: Haas (16th & 17th)

In the top 10 with Ollie Bearman on Friday, yet at the bottom of the Q2 pile with him on Saturday and out in Q1 with Esteban Ocon. Like partner Ferrari, Haas left its best pace behind in the inconsequential sessions.

Ocon was back to pointing at parts inconsistencies for his struggle. Bearman was hugely unimpressed with the track limits laptime deletion that left him 16th, but wouldn't have been much better off had that lap stood.

"The others have just caught up and got more out of their package, whereas literally we haven't changed the set-up since we put the car down on Friday morning, so we're not going to really find any more laptime," said Bearman.

"Our gap to the front ultimately hasn't really changed from FP1 to now, but the others have caught up and overtaken us.

"We've done a good job, I've been really proud of how I've driven, I think I've driven really well, but the others just have a bit more downforce, and at the end, by the time the important sessions come around, they're able to use it to be in front." - MB

Winner: Fernando Alonso (15th)

Alonso capitalised on the struggles of Cadillac, Haas and Williams to make Q2 - with what turned out to be a chunky 0.291s margin over Ocon behind - but would have been slowest of all in Q2 but for Bearman's track-limits transgression.

"The car was good," Alonso reported afterwards. "We only had some issues on the power unit, delivering torque onto the corners a little bit inconsistent. 

"Some laps we had push, sometimes we had a handbraking feeling in the middle of the corners, so that was the thing that removes a little bit of confidence in the driver, but it was a nice qualifying."

Grid penalties for Lindblad, Franco Colapinto and Gabriel Bortoleto mean Alonso will start 12th - and so in reach of the top 10 if things fall Aston Martin's way on Sunday.

"I think on merit we are P15 or P16, so there are some fast cars coming from behind as a threat," Alonso said.

"So we need to keep an eye on that and then the performance we see. Sometimes on Sundays we are better than Saturdays, that's true and hopefully tomorrow is one of those days." - BA

Loser: Williams (19th & 20th)

They were at least comfortably clear of the Cadillacs but this was still a chastening qualifying session for the Williams drivers, as the Austin circuit brutally exposed the car's lack of aerodynamic load.

"We definitely struggle a lot with simply just running a car that is lacking downforce from the beginning of the year and a car that is underdeveloped," said Carlos Sainz. 

"In order to get the weight down, we developed the weight, but we didn't develop the aero as much as the others. 

"We managed to get the car on weight, but now we're down on aero and in the end, it's a car that has been very weak from the beginning. So, honestly, not surprised to see us where we are."

Alex Albon called his qualifying session a "s*** show" over team radio, and elaborated later in the media pen that he's found it tricky to sit on the line between underdriving and overdriving the car on what he feels is probably the team's worst circuit of the season.

"In hindsight, maybe not necessarily a s*** show," he said. "Just tricky. Confusing. Hard to get a lap out of it. Easy to underdrive, easy to overdrive.

"Feels like this track is bumpy, high speed, low speed, windy. We know from previous years that it's normally not a track that suits us. But then this year, this weekend has been particularly painful. 

"We had some issues on the car on Friday. We changed some of the parts around. They weren't optimal things, but we had to do it to fix some of the issues on the car. And then we've come into this weekend, honestly, a little bit salvaging the rest of the weekend. 

"I think the little things that I get frustrated about is more… we have a bad car, can we control our controllables in terms of making sure that we're maximising our performance, whether it's run plans, tyre preparation, that kind of stuff? That's the stuff we can manage ourselves and we can extract ourselves. 

"Driving-wise, I don't think I drove well in the session. At the minute, it feels a little bit like a moving target in the car. I'm just not feeling the rhythm with the car, not knowing where its limit actually is." - BA