From an unexpected championship leader to a Lewis Hamilton rediscovering his best form, cancelled races, and unpopular new rules, the opening 11 races of the F1 2026 have offered some genuine surprises.

Here are five of the biggest winners from the first half of the F1 2026 season, with drivers, teams and even a circuit making the cut.

Biggest winners of F1 2026

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Though some of the winners were predictable, with the writing on the wall even last season, others have come entirely out of the blue.

Kimi Antonelli

Few would have predicted ahead of the season that, at its halfway point, Kimi Antonelli would be atop the world championship standings.

When the Mercedes W17 proved rapid out of the box, all eyes turned to George Russell. Vastly more experienced than Antonelli, and well clear of the F1 growing pains the young Italian is still encountering, it was expected that the Brit would lead Mercedes’ title charge.

And yet it has been Antonelli who hit the ground running. In just his second year of F1, he’s been gifted an opportunity to fight for a championship with a ruleset that doesn’t penalise his inexperience – at least no more so than any other driver on the grid has been.

After a debut season that left many questioning whether he’d been promoted to F1 too quickly, Kimi Antonelli has done much to showcase himself as the sport’s next superstar. That is not entirely of his own doing, and he has unquestionably been in the right place at the right time this season, making him the biggest winner of F1 2026.

Alpine

The decision to stop building its own power units was a bold one, but the switch to Mercedes has proved exactly the right move.

All-new regulations for F1 2026 were well-timed for the Enstone team, which is on the upward tick of a rebuilding phase after a number of difficult years. Stability behind the scenes is beginning to manifest itself on track too, with Steve Nielsen and Flavio Briatore having long made many of the more difficult decisions – though most of those were made prior to Nielsen’s arrival.

Even still, dumping in-house power for a customer Mercedes supply was a gamble, albeit one with limited downsides given it reduced Renault’s costs while HPP has a track record of delivering competitive engines from the outset.

It could have gone spectacularly wrong, but instead Alpine has used the new rules as the reset it was so looking for, and catapulted itself back into the F1 midfield.

Lewis Hamilton

Just a year ago, seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton looked a broken man. He encouraged his team to replace him as he struggled to come to grips with his Ferrari, and failed to gel with his race engineer.

But the Lewis Hamilton that has emerged in F1 2026 is altogether different; more confident, calmer, and happier. Exactly what has sparked that rebirth of sorts is anyone’s guess, but the net result is the Hamilton of old; a race winner, a hungry, aggressive world champion who doesn’t push those around him, but leads them forward.

He’s proved a match for Charles Leclerc, beating the Monegasque to score Ferrari’s first win of the season, and on balance the more settled of the two Scuderia drivers. After a year in which his career looked at risk of petering out, Hamilton has shown us in no uncertain terms that he remains one of the very best in F1.

Sergio Perez

After being dropped by Red Bull at the end of the F1 2024 season, the future was murky at best for Sergio Perez. A return with Cadillac was a pragmatic decision on both sides – an experienced, race-winning driver who could help a team during its formative stages who, in return, was handed perhaps a roll of the dice in F1.

And what a roll it’s been.

While his stakes rose after Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda struggled to fill his shoes during F1 2025 at Red Bull, he has caught the eye once again since returning to the grid. Perez has done nothing exceptional, but he’s also delivered exactly what Cadillac has needed.

Those performances haven’t just benefitted the team, with the Mexican reasserting himself as deserving of a place on the F1 grid – and potentially one a little further forward than he currently occupies.

Malaysia

A return to Malaysia was not on the agenda as the F1 2026 season started and yet the Sepang circuit is now poised to host the most unlikely of events. Even better than that, it will do so at a fraction of the usual cost thanks to organisers in Bahrain footing the bill.

Hence, despite being held half a world away, the race will be known as the Bahrain Grand Prix. It’s a popular addition, a venue both familiar and alien in equal measure. More than that, it highlighted the sport’s ability to pivot and come to creative solutions that keep the championship (and its financial underpinnings) ticking over. With places on the F1 calendar extremely limited, and usually locked away for at least the short-term, the specifics of Sepang’s return both unfortunate in terms of the events that generated it, but arguably one of the biggest wins in F1 race promotion history.

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Five biggest winners of F1 2026