Kimi Antonelli has 171 points, five wins and a championship lead worth 40 over his Mercedes teammate. He has also, almost single-handedly, buried the story of everyone else who arrived in 2026. Because there are three other rookies on the grid, and the season looks very different from where they are sitting.
Start with Franco Colapinto, the highest-placed of the newcomer trio in 13th on the road — 12th in the standings on 16 points. That is not a headline number, but read it against the machinery. Alpine sit fifth in the constructors' championship on 57 points, and Gasly's shock Monaco podium accounts for a huge slice of that. Colapinto's job at Enstone is to bank whatever the car will give on a normal weekend, and 16 points from a midfield Alpine is honest, unglamorous work.
Lindblad's steep RB apprenticeship
Arvid Lindblad has the hardest brief of the three. Promoted into RB alongside Liam Lawson, the teenager has 14 points and sits 13th, just behind Colapinto and one spot ahead of a Williams driven by Carlos Sainz. RB are sixth in the constructors' on 44, and Lindblad has contributed a genuine chunk of that against a teammate — Lawson, on 30 — who has a full season of grand prix experience and a head start in the sister car's dramas. For a rookie parachuted into the Red Bull ecosystem while the senior team implodes around Max Verstappen's winless season, staying in the points conversation at all is the achievement.
Then there is Gabriel Bortoleto, and here the numbers are unforgiving. Two points, 17th in the standings, and an Audi that sits ninth of eleven in the constructors' table on 2 — meaning Bortoleto has scored every single point the Audi project has managed all year. His teammate, the vastly experienced Nico Hulkenberg, is on zero. That is the redemption in Bortoleto's season: in a car that has no business troubling the top ten, he is the only one who has dragged it there.
Context is everything
The trap with a rookie class is measuring everyone against the outlier. Antonelli is in the best car on the grid — Mercedes lead the constructors' on 302 with seven wins — and he has made it sing. Colapinto, Lindblad and Bortoleto are not failing by comparison; they are driving cars that finish fifth, sixth and ninth in the pecking order, and mostly extracting what those cars are worth.
The order among them is clear after eight rounds: Colapinto on top by a whisker, Lindblad breathing down his neck with the tougher teammate comparison, and Bortoleto carrying Audi's entire points tally on his own. Silverstone on 5 July is the next test. None of them will win it. All three have something left to prove — and, crucially, a reason to believe they can.