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.
The drivers on this list spend races asking the pit wall where the car ahead is losing time. Every message from the most recent race is in our Spanish Grand Prix 2026 race radio archive.
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 most overtakes in an F1 race by one driver
The highest published figure is 18, by Lewis Hamilton at the 2016 Chinese Grand Prix, where he started from the back. It comes from Pirelli's season statistics. Pirelli's 2017 figures put the high for that year at 13, by Daniel Ricciardo at the British Grand Prix, also from the back of the grid.
There is no official all-time record. Neither Formula 1 nor the FIA publishes overtaking counts, so every figure you find comes from somebody's own method, and the methods differ enough to change the answer.
So we ran ours over every Grand Prix from 2018 to the 2026 Italian Grand Prix, 186 races in all. The most on-track passes by one driver in a single race was 14, by Sebastian Vettel at the 2018 Japanese Grand Prix. He started eighth, was spun down to 19th after contact with Max Verstappen at Spoon, and passed his way back up to sixth.
What a pass sounds like from inside the car is on each driver's own page, for example Max Verstappen's team radio, which collects every message we hold for him.
Passes
Driver
Race
Grid
Finish
14
Sebastian Vettel, Ferrari
2018 Japanese GP
8
6
12
Alexander Albon, Red Bull
2019 United States GP
6
5
12
Lando Norris, McLaren
2023 Mexico City GP
17
5
12
Sebastian Vettel, Ferrari
2018 Italian GP
2
4
10
Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes
2019 Hungarian GP
2
8
10
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari
2019 Japanese GP
2
6
10
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari
2021 Styrian GP
7
7
10
Carlos Sainz, Ferrari
2022 French GP
19
5
10
Sergio Perez, Red Bull
2023 Australian GP
20
5
10
Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes
2023 Las Vegas GP
10
7
Most on-track passes by one driver in a single race, 2018 to the 2026 Italian Grand Prix, counted with the method set out below
The top of the list is made of recovery drives. Each of the top four started out of position or was pushed there early, in a car quick enough to come back. Vettel appears twice: Suzuka after the Verstappen contact, and Monza in 2018, where contact with Hamilton at the Roggia chicane on the opening lap spun him to the back before he recovered to fourth. Norris started 17th in Mexico City and finished fifth. Albon's race in Austin began with contact with Carlos Sainz at turn 1.
Why our number is lower than Pirelli's
Pirelli counts a move made on any complete flying lap and held to the line, which means everything from lap 2 onward. We start a lap later, and we also throw out any position swap where either car pitted on either lap, or where the lap was not green for both. Stricter rules produce smaller numbers, so a 14 here and an 18 there are not measuring quite the same thing. The timing data we use begins in 2018, so 2016 China cannot be rerun on our method.
What about Ocon's 14 at Zandvoort?
Search for this record and you will find Esteban Ocon credited with 14 overtakes at the 2023 Dutch Grand Prix, in a race said to have produced 186. That count came from a Reddit user's analysis, reported by The Drive, which called the record unofficial. It left out position changes caused by pit stops, and 63 of the passes came on lap 3 alone, as heavy rain arrived.
That is exactly the kind of race where methods split. The 2023 Dutch Grand Prix has 374 lap-to-lap position swaps in the timing data. Remove every swap where either car was on an in-lap or an out-lap and 72 are left. Apply the green-flag rule too and it is 65, with Ocon and George Russell top on 8 each. Even so, it is still the busiest race in our whole count, ahead of the 2026 Italian Grand Prix (58), the 2025 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix (57) and the 2024 Las Vegas Grand Prix (57).
The single-race high, season by season
2018: 14, Vettel, Japanese GP
2019: 12, Albon, United States GP
2020: 8, shared by Gasly (Belgian GP), Hamilton (Italian GP) and Russell (Sakhir GP)
2021: 10, Leclerc, Styrian GP
2022: 10, Sainz, French GP
2023: 12, Norris, Mexico City GP
2024: 9, Perez, Las Vegas GP
2025: 9, Alonso, Canadian GP
2026 so far: 9, shared by Russell (Hungarian GP) and Antonelli (Italian GP)
The rest of this article is the 2025 season, driver by driver.
How a pass gets counted
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.
The first two laps are excluded, so the start and the shuffle straight after it do not count. The start is its own event and we have measured it separately.
The season, driver by driver
Hamilton: 52
Albon: 47
Bearman: 47
Antonelli: 46
Sainz: 40
Alonso: 37
Hulkenberg: 36
Stroll: 34
Russell: 32
Verstappen: 28
Leclerc: 27
Norris: 26
Tsunoda: 26
Piastri: 24
Ocon: 22
Gasly: 19
Bortoleto: 19
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.
One further caveat the data cannot see: not every pass is fought for. Some are arranged. We counted the language of a team order across the whole of our radio archive and found it in one message in 251, with "let him past" the single most common form, in what 37,359 radio messages show about team orders. Those passes count here exactly like any other.
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. The first two laps are excluded: the first comparison is between the end of lap 2 and the end of lap 3.
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.
The single-race record uses the same rules over every Grand Prix from 2018 to the 2026 Italian Grand Prix, 186 races.
Timing rows that cannot be real are dropped: any lap more than 1.6 times or less than 0.85 times the race's typical green-flag lap. The timing feed occasionally merges two laps into one row, and without this check Lance Stroll would be credited with 13 passes on a single lap at the 2021 Styrian Grand Prix. It changes no 2025 figure.
The 2018 Italian Grand Prix was counted from the raw timing feed, because the standard lap table does not build for that race. The same code reproduces the 2018 Japanese Grand Prix count exactly.
Position changes are the clearest signal of what a driver is doing on a given lap.
The Formula Dream app runs a live Dashboard through every session: every car moving on the circuit map, and a timing tower with lap times, gaps and intervals, tyre compound and age, pit counts and positions gained or lost. It is the same information these measurements come from, arriving live. You also get live driver radio as it is broadcast, and every FIA document of the weekend as it is published.
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Singapore Sprint 2026 Results: Russell Crashes From the Lead
Russell took the lead at turn one and crashed at the final corner of the same lap. Verstappen won, Hamilton charged to second, and the McLarens hit each other.
