Kimi Antonelli is the big Winner after qualifying at Silverstone, as he completed a clean sweep of Saturday’s action to extend his championship lead.

Here is PlanetF1.com’s full list of winners and losers from the 2026 British Grand Prix qualifying.

Kimi Antonelli leads British GP qualifying winners and losers

Winner: Kimi Antonelli

The young Italian may have been a little stressed heading into the final moments of Q3, as he took to team radio to question why he was going out first – a situation he said he “never really likes” – but he didn’t put a wheel wrong despite the trickiness of the wind gusts around the former airfield.

This was very much a continuation of where Antonelli had been earlier in the day, where he overcame Lewis Hamilton’s strong start to the Sprint race to hunt down and pass his illustrious opponent.

His confidence with the car’s feeling from the Sprint was such that he made minimal setup changes once parc ferme was lifted between the sessions. But he did need to make tweaks in terms of brake migration and differential after some mild locking in Q2, and he explained that he had found the settings he needed to progress through the session after some solid teamwork with his side of the garage.

With British drivers galore scattered amongst the top teams, Antonelli is the most likely to break British hearts on Sunday and, with his race pace consistently impressive this year, starting from pole position means that, extraneous circumstances aside, he’s likely to consolidate his championship lead further.

Loser: George Russell

After his solid, if slightly unconvincing, Austrian Grand Prix weekend seemed to right the ship of his erratic championship so far, the inconsistency returned on Saturday.

Having not joined in the battle for the podium positions in the Sprint, Russell started his qualifying session with an error at Luffield as he locked up and slid off into the gravel trap and tapped the barriers.

Fortunate to avoid serious damage, he confirmed afterwards there were no lingering issues once he’d been fitted with a new front wing but, clearly eager not to ruminate on the errors, he said he had “never locked up in that corner” in his previous 12 years of racing at Silverstone.

“We made some changes to the setup,” he said.

“It was probably more extreme than before. I don’t know what happened. It was weird.”

What was of more concern to Russell was that an issue, visible on the data, is costing him time down the straights.

“If you look at the speed traps, it’s 3kph down in the middle sector, 6k down in the last sector compared to my teammate and compared to the other McLaren cars.

“The team are working super hard to understand why that is. We thought we found the problem this morning, and we thought the brakes were locking on, but we’re not convinced that’s the issue, but it just compounds everything when going into the session knowing you’re at a bit of a disadvantage.”

But what’s becoming clear is that, as the season closes in on the halfway point summer break, Russell simply appears – for any number of reasons – unable to put in the sort of peerless weekend that his teammate is regularly capable of.

Even on one of Antonelli’s less polished weekends, as he had in Austria, his race pace eclipsed that of Russell’s, with his defeat coming as a result of some inexperience and scruffiness rather than speed.

For Russell, the moments in which he clearly has a pace advantage are few and far between and, on a weekend where he has the crowd cheering him on as one of the frontrunning British drivers, his chances of even taking a podium aren’t certain.

Winner: Ferrari

Ferrari expected to lose out to Mercedes over the longer race distance of the Sprint, and that’s exactly what happened: Lewis Hamilton was able to hold the lead for a few laps, but couldn’t hold Antonelli off for long.

Following the introduction of the ADUO-upgraded power unit in Austria, the lower temperatures and altitude is playing more favourably into the characteristics of the engine with its larger turbo, and the expected power deficit is not as pronounced as might have been thought.

But the data shows that Ferrari and Mercedes have opted for different deployment priorities around the lap and, while the overall laptime is there over a single lap, Ferrari still lacks ultimate straight-line speed towards the end of the straights.

It’s for this reason that Hamilton was powerless against Antonelli in the Sprint, and it’s difficult to see how the Grand Prix will be much different.

With Hamilton thrilling the home crowd through the Sprint running, Charles Leclerc also seems to have bounced back from his recent difficult run of form as the Monegasque slotted his car into second place.

Explaining that he’d made some pretty big changes to his setup following the Sprint, Leclerc opted against revealing what he’s doing differently.

“It’s not as big as what people think. It’s just trying to… I had two approaches recently,” he said.

“There was either the one where I just changed my driving style completely and just try and reproduce what Lewis is doing, because clearly it’s working, or keep pushing in my direction and trying to find a way around where the car just fits my driving a little bit better.

“And I went towards the second route, which was to stick with what I know worked in the past and try to find a way around with the car and with every tool that I have available inside the car. So that’s really what we did, and it definitely worked out. But I still want to stress that it’s only one qualifying session.

“I mean, Austria, it wasn’t a bad one either, but I don’t think I had quite a good feeling. This one is different and it definitely feels better. But my focus now is to stay there and keep improving. As I said, it’s only a first step. That doesn’t mean that from now on it’s going to change my season. Surely it feels good to at least have a qualifying where the feeling is good, where I know where the limit of the car is.

“I don’t think I had any moments throughout that qualifying, because I knew exactly what to expect from the car. And that is a particularly good feeling after the struggles I’ve had recently.”

With an aero package that’s clearly working, and a power unit that only appears slightly weaker than the Mercedes, the two Ferrari drivers being close to the top suggests the Scuderia is starting to come good through this middle phase of the season.

Loser: Max Verstappen

It’s not often that Max Verstappen is outqualified by a teammate, particularly as the performance of the car has ramped up.

But Silverstone has not been a strong weekend for the Milton Keynes-based squad so far, with the highs of the Austrian weekend already a distant memory.

Isack Hadjar claimed fifth, with Verstappen in seventh, and the Dutch driver spoke about his engine behaviour in the post-session media pen.

Revealing that the engine hasn’t been “running right”, he also said the balance of the car hasn’t been correct ever since first taking to the track on Friday.

So unhappy with the feeling from the RB22 is he, that Verstappen even suggested that he’d like to break parc ferme conditions to try a different setup, despite this meaning starting from the pitlane, such is the expected futility of going racing with the car in its current state.

As for Hadjar, the French driver said he’s “felt good” with the car, but lamented that it’s lacking a bit of pace everywhere.

“It’s not one place that we are slow, or one that we are very fast. It’s just a bit everywhere.”

Team boss Laurent Mekies explained that Red Bull hasn’t been able to find the sweet spot of the car in the way it was in Austria as the upgrade package was rolled out; a long afternoon awaits on Sunday.

More from the Austrian Grand Prix

Significant Ferrari loss to Mercedes uncovered in British GP qualifying data

Kimi Antonelli beats Ferrari duo to British Grand Prix pole at Silverstone

Winner: Racing Bulls

Racing Bulls has clearly paid significant rent in order to hold onto the ninth and 10th positions for as long as it has: coming off the back of three consecutive race weekends in those places, the Faenza-based squad did it yet again on Saturday.

Arvid Lindblad came out on top on this occasion to take ninth place, the best position possible for anyone outside of the top four teams, while Lawson was almost half a second behind in 10th.

It stands to just how strong Racing Bulls are at this point that Lawson was actually quite displeased after qualifying, having felt that his pace had dropped away through each segment of the session.

“We just had a messy session,” he said.

“I mean, we went slower in every single session after Q1. I don’t really know why we peaked in Q1, but yeah, the balance just got worse and worse, and we just went slower.

“So, luckily it was fast enough to go through the Q, but to ourselves we should be improving our work. If we did that, we’d be fighting some of the top guys.”

With Alpine recently falling off the boil as the new upgrades appear to have destablised the platform, and Audi still lacking on the horsepower front, Racing Bulls’ consistency at the head of the midfield may continue for a little while yet.

Loser: McLaren

With Lando Norris putting in a great drive in the Sprint to claim a third place he didn’t expect, the reigning World Champion was brought back down to earth after qualifying as he took sixth place.

Stony-faced as he talked to the media afterwards, the joy of last year’s success not being repeatable appeared to have sunk in as he couldn’t hide his disappointment at what had been a difficult session.

“It’s just tough, like we just don’t have any pace,” he said.

“We were seven-tenths off pole, and I thought my lap was pretty, pretty amazing. Like, I was very happy with my lap. I improved in every single corner, and I felt like I got everything out of the car.

So we’re just slow – the car, we’re slow in the straights, we’re slow in all the corners. There’s nothing more I can say apart from that.

“So the car is not very efficient at the minute, which makes it pretty unbelievable that we finished P3, considering we’re seven-tenths off, so there’s no excuses, the car’s not good enough, and we know that, and then we just have to keep working hard, that’s it.”

Team boss Andrea Stella spoke of the gusty conditions making life trickier for McLaren, saying, “When you have these conditions, I think there’s a premium for the cars that have the best behaviour in the corners, the best grip in the corners.

“So I’m not surprised, in a way, that Ferrari and Mercedes, they opened up the gap to Red Bull and McLaren today, where the grip conditions were more difficult.”

But the Italian also revealed that he believes there are still more conversations needed with Mercedes High-Performance Powertrains in order for his team to fully unlock the potential of the power unit.

“It’s a circuit where there’s an important starvation from an energy point of view, and power unit exploitation and power unit performance is particularly important,” he said, emphasising that, while McLaren do have a deficit in terms of car development, the power unit is also a contributing factor.

“I have to say, and I’ve said that other times, that we still seem to have a little bit of a deficit in extracting the most from the HPP power unit: if you look at the GPS, it becomes apparent that somehow we need to keep our conversation open with HPP, because there’s some performance we seem to be leaving behind.”

Given that Stella has previously said that this season is the first in which it is feeling some pain in that it is still a customer team, in a season that breaks the half-decade engine freeze that previously existed, there’s nothing particularly new in this claim, but there may still be some surprise at just how much of a gap in understanding the reigning World Champions still have compared to the factory team.

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Kimi Antonelli stars as Max Verstappen struggles: British GP qualifying winners and losers