Lewis Hamilton made 52 on-track passes in the 2025 season, more than any other driver.
But the number that actually says something about a driver is at Haas. Oliver Bearman made 2.14 times as many passes as Esteban Ocon, in the same car, from an almost identical average grid position: 14.2 against 15.0.
And the assumption underneath all of this, that drivers who start further back overtake more, turns out to be false. The correlation between average grid slot and passes per race is minus 0.03. There is no relationship at all.
Total on-track passes made by each driver across the 2025 season
The same method we used to count overtaking at every circuit. A pass is counted only when a driver is behind another at the end of one lap and ahead at the end of the next, with neither driver pitting on either lap, both laps green for both drivers, and both still running.
That last set of conditions is the whole game. Most position changes in a Grand Prix are pit stop cycles, not overtakes. Count those and you produce a table that measures pit strategy and calls it racecraft.
Verstappen, Norris and Piastri sit in the lower half. That is not a comment on any of them. They averaged grid slots of 3.4, 3.0 and 2.7 respectively, and you cannot pass cars that are behind you.
Which brings us to the correction that has to be made.
Starting at the back does not mean overtaking more
The obvious adjustment is to control for grid position. Drivers who start 15th have fifteen cars in front of them and drivers who start second have one.
So we checked. And the adjustment turns out to be unnecessary, because the relationship does not exist.
On-track passes per race plotted against average grid position for every full-season driver
Correlation: minus 0.03. The fitted line is flat.
Hulkenberg averaged 14.8 on the grid and made 1.57 passes a race. Norris averaged 3.0 and made 1.08. Twelve places of difference in starting position produced half a pass a race of difference in outcome.
The reason is that the two effects cancel. A car at the back has more cars to pass, and less pace to pass them with. A car at the front has fewer targets, but when it does need to come through the field it can. Averaged across a season those two roughly balance, and where you start tells you almost nothing about how much overtaking you will do.
That is a genuinely useful thing to know, because "he was stuck in traffic all year" and "he started at the back so of course he passed people" are both commonly heard and neither survives the data.
The clean comparison: team-mates
Grid position is not the confound. The car is.
A quick driver in a quick car that qualifies badly will pass a lot of people. A quick driver in a slow car will not, however well they drive. There is exactly one way to control for machinery, and it is to compare drivers who share it.
On-track passes per race compared between team-mates across the 2025 season
The Haas result is the strongest single finding in this article, because it is the one where nothing else differs. Same car. Average grid positions of 14.2 and 15.0, effectively identical. And Bearman made more than twice the passes.
Hulkenberg against Bortoleto is nearly as clean: grid slots of 14.8 and 14.0, and Hulkenberg passed 1.89 times as often. That is a rookie against one of the most experienced racers on the grid, in equal machinery, and the gap is exactly where you would expect experience to show.
Hamilton against Leclerc needs a caveat. Hamilton passed 1.93 times as often, but he also averaged four grid places further back, at 9.4 against 5.4. Some of that gap is simply that he had more cars ahead of him more often. Given the flat grid relationship above, that probably explains less of it than instinct suggests, but it is not a like-for-like pairing in the way Haas and Sauber are.
And two pairs are dead level. Norris and Piastri differ by 4%, Stroll and Alonso by 1%. Stroll matching Alonso is notable given he averaged five and a half places further back on the grid.
What this does and does not tell you
It measures completed on-track passes, and that is not the same thing as racecraft. A driver who spends fifteen laps stuck behind a rival they never get past scores zero, whatever the quality of the attempt. A driver whose car is quick in a straight line on a circuit with a long straight scores well.
It also does not separate opportunity from ability within a team. Team-mates get different strategies, different safety car luck and different reliability.
What it does do is remove the two biggest confounds people usually forget: pit stop cycles, which dominate raw position-change counts, and machinery, which dominates everything else. Once both are gone, the Haas and Sauber numbers are hard to explain away.
Method
Data: FastF1, all 24 races of the 2025 season. 612 on-track passes in total, of which 610 were made by the twenty drivers with enough appearances to be listed here.
A pass requires a position swap between consecutive laps, no pit in or pit out for either driver on either lap, green flag on both laps for both, and valid times throughout. Lap 1 excluded.
Positions come from cumulative end-of-lap session times, so lapped traffic cannot register as a pass.
Drivers with fewer than 15 race appearances are excluded from the per-race and team-mate comparisons.
Team allocation derived from session results across six events, taking each driver's most frequent team. Drivers who changed teams mid-season are assigned their dominant team, which affects the Red Bull and Racing Bulls pairings and is why those two comparisons are the weakest here.
The grid relationship (r = -0.03) is computed across full-season drivers only, on season averages rather than race by race. A race-by-race model would be a stronger test.
Passes are credited to the overtaking driver. A pass conceded because of damage, a slow puncture or a team order is indistinguishable from a fought one in this data.
