Winners and losers from F1 2026 Brazilian GP qualifying

A proper wet weather qualifying session was always going to produce some colossal performances, and some outings to forget, too.

Here are our winners and losers from a bonkers session, which featured everything from zeroes to heroes.

Loser: George Russell (2nd)

Russell’s simmering rage could have dried half of the Interlagos track on its own after he aborted what he felt was definitely going to be the pole position lap.

It almost certainly wasn’t. He was very slightly up on Lando Norris’s lap, but was set to be contained by Alex Albon’s Williams in the final sector, where Russell would have lost a heap of time.

And he wouldn’t have started on pole anyway due to a five-place grid penalty.

But you could tell this session meant more to Russell than the position he’d actually have at the end of it.

Russell was fast, all the time, and quicker than Kimi Antonelli. He wanted to make it count. He still did, mostly. But after losing the championship, all the talk about his bad luck, and the frustrating reality that he's too often been second-best, this was looking like a rare win.

It should still be, really. For him to come out of it so unhappy, though, and with a seventh-place start when he was probably the quickest driver out there, is an underserved loss. - Scott Mitchell-Malm

Winner: Lando Norris (1st)

This was a third Interlagos Grand Prix pole in a row for Norris, who has basically been the man around this track in qualifying since 2024, when McLaren first got properly competitive again.

Maaaybe it would have been a different story in terms of the headline result had George Russell not got stuck behind Alex Albon then told by Mercedes to abort his best lap, but that should take nothing away from Norris.

We know how tricky that McLaren is to drive and yet he was fastest of all in Q1 and there again in Q3 when it really counted.

He soon won’t be world champion anymore, but he sure is driving like one. - Ben Anderson

Loser: Gabriel Bortoleto (22nd)

Last year, in his maiden home grand prix, Gabriel Bortoleto crashed in the sprint race, missed qualifying and crashed in the grand prix proper. This year there's no sprint, but the pattern continued as he crashed in qualifying. This clearly worries him.

Asked how did he feel after qualifying, given what happened last year, he replied: "Right now, shit, right? What can I say?

"Last year I had a crash, this year I couldn't do qualifying properly because I messed up. So, yeah, it looks like home race for me hasn't been good yet. Even if all FPs have been incredible, it just looks like when I need to deliver in qualifying, I messed up now."

In Bortoleto's defence, his contact with the wall at Juncao was so light; the only reason it put him out is because it somehow broke his rear wing. F

ellow Brazilian Rafael Camara smacked the wall much harder in Q1 and escaped, and while it's up to Bortoleto to keep it on the road, this one is a tough break. Especially seeing how competitive team-mate Nico Hulkenberg was. - Jack Benyon

Winner: Liam Lawson (5th)

Liam Lawson's grand season for Racing Bulls has a new qualifying high point as he will start third on the grid.

It still counts as his best of the season even though Lawson was keen to play down the achievement slightly as he stressed he wasn't third-fastest.

And actually, Lawson was kicking himself slightly that the result wasn't better. He hinted that there might have been a top-three start on the cards anyway, but he let himself get a bit too close to Fernando Alonso on the lap that conditions were best. 

It was still a clear best-of-the-rest victory, though, one that came with an unusually high upside and a shot at a significant points haul on Sunday. - SMM

Winner: Fernando Alonso (9th)

Much like Nico Hulkenberg, Fernando Alonso is always someone you look for in wet and changeable conditions and while his team-mate went out in Q1, Alonso took the Aston Martin all the way to its first Q3 and best starting spot of the year - which will work out as eighth unless there are any more penalties to factor in.

While Honda's driveability issues were still giving Alonso a headache, the wet definitely brought the Aston Martin into a better window, even if the top five he had targeted (imagine saying that about Aston Martin pre-Hungary upgrade!) proved to be out of reach because "I think the top six guys were in an unreachable planet".

This was a really solid showing where a) the car or engine didn't fully let him down like in Mexico and b) he took just the right number of risks to get to the end in a decent position without any major errors.

Well judged by driver and team overall. - JB

Winner: Charles Leclerc (4th)

Leclerc wasn’t happy with how Q3 went and wasn’t happy with his final result from that session either, but the reason he makes the winners’ list is because of how Ferrari attacked what he feels has been one of its biggest weaknesses since he joined the team.

“It's a very strange feeling because of course I'm not happy with P4 and I think the end result is a little bit disappointing. However, I believe that this has been a very, very interesting session and a session that we will learn from a lot going forward,” Leclerc said.

“Having the 10-grid-places penalty, I think we allowed ourselves to be a bit more experimental in terms of various different things and I think there was a very good correlation on when we were strong during this session and when we were not strong and what we were doing in the background.

“In nine years with the team, I think the biggest weakness has always been wet sessions, whereas in the junior categories that was probably my biggest strength, and today there has been moments of qualifying where I've had a very good feeling with the car.

“It's kind of a philosophy thing where we've been struggling no matter what generation of cars we've been in.

In 2019 we were struggling, in 2023 we were struggling and with these ones we are struggling as well.

“Whether we can carry those learnings into race where you've got to do multiple laps is another thing, but in qualifying at least I thought it was a good one.” - BA

Winner: Nico Hulkenberg (5th)

Given his best qualifying of Audi's maiden year was ninth in Spain, if you had offered Hulkenberg a fourth-place start pre-weekend I'm sure he would have bitten your hand off.

He always feels like a factor in qualifying when the conditions are changeable, his pole here in 2010 proved as much, but ahead of his 269th F1 start he's still managing these performances.

He was regularly the fastest car in Q1 when he completed a lap, and while not quite as strong on the inters, he was still sixth on the road and boosted forward by penalties.

And all of this having only had one session in the car, as Freddie Slater took the car for first practice and the car was broken for FP2.

Hulkenberg was remarkably chill about this day in his media session afterwards, saying: "I knew that if I have a good feeling and confidence with the car, it doesn't cost too much not having run yesterday, and luckily that was the case today." - JB

Loser: Lewis Hamilton (11th)

He’s lumped into this part of the list owing to the fact he now faces a mountain to climb in Sunday’s race from a back-of-the-grid start.

Problems with the new Ferrari engine he planned to take in final practice meant more additional components and so a penalty more severe than anticipated.

He called his qualifying “basically a practice session for us to try and understand the conditions and how the tyres work”, and it’s clear he’s also not expecting much of a ‘burn from the stern’ in the race without DRS to aid overtaking.

“I think overtaking will be very, very, very hard,” Hamilton declared. “I’m not sure you’re going to see the same sort of races that you’ve seen in the past.” - BA

Winner: Haas (8th & 13th)

Both drivers went off the track, and rookie Rafael Camara ended his qualifying session in the barriers! But even though that crash will have likely made team boss Ayao Komatsu wince at the cost cap implications, this will still go down as a broad success for Haas.

On the one hand you’ve got star driver Ollie Bearman qualifying eighth, bagging Haas’s best qualifying result of the season. He’ll start the race as high as sixth owing to grid penalties, too.

For Camara, this was an incredible baptism of fire in the most extreme conditions imaginable, so even though he damaged the car - for which he apologised - Haas will surely be delighted with what he produced performance-wise: quicker than Bearman in Q1 - despite a small crash there also - and firmly in the middle of the grid for his F1 debut. - BA

Winner: Alex Albon (10th)

Being in Q3 for the first time this year was a major surprise for Alex Albon, whose Williams team has essentially written off the final part of the season, at least in terms of expectations.

He acknowledged that had the conditions been dry, we would not have seen the result today. But it was wet! And Albon very much made the most of it.

The only downside was how Q3 went once Albon got there. He struggled to get the tyres working, so the first lap was a bit limited and on the second he suffered a big lock-up into Turn 12. Then the conditions worsened, so he ended Q3 slowest - gaining a place due to Leclerc's grid penalty. - SMM

Loser: Alpine (17th & 18th)

It wasn’t a good look to see the two Alpines tripping over each other at the crucial final moments of Q1, on an improving track, but this was also a session overall in which a car that often troubles the very front of the midfield was absolutely nowhere.

Pierre Gasly suggested Alpine needed to review its procedures considering how he ended up “riding his [Colapinto’s] gearbox” and missing out on a place in Q2 by three tenths of a second.

“Unfortunately that particular lap was my best lap and I almost clipped his wheel on the line and I had to lift in the kink in the back straight so it was not ideal,” Gasly said.

“I think we could have sneaked through Q2 in 15th, but looking at the bigger picture we were absolutely nowhere throughout the whole session and it's confusing why it felt so bad.”

Colapinto reported “really poor” grip and felt Alpine “didn’t find the right compromise” on set-up for the wet conditions, struggling particularly to make Pirelli’s extreme wet tyre work.

“I was just sliding around, no grip, no traction, no front at apex and just generally lacking grip,” he said. “Then the tyres were really overheating by the end of the session.” - BA

Loser: Oscar Piastri (12th)

The red flag caused by Camara's crash stopped Oscar Piastri from getting one final lap in during Q2, and not for the first time this year, he was nowhere while his team-mate was fastest.

Ultimately it was the decision to switch to inters too late in Q2 that cost him dearest, regardless of what was happening outside of his control.

"We needed that extra lap to really get some temperature into them," he explained.

Much like the story of this year, while Norris is seemingly able to conjure extraordinary feats in remarkable moments, Piastri just can't find that magic in this 2026 McLaren. - JB