2026 Madrid GP in numbers: Hamilton loses a 14 race streak and retirements double
F1 Legend Sim · Staff · 15 September 2026 · 6 min read
The first Madrid Grand Prix ended with four cars stopped out of 22, and one of them decided who won. Four retirements in a single race is not a striking number on its own. Counting the whole season is what makes it one: 2026 cars are retiring at nearly twice last year's rate, and the year on year rise is the largest of the 22 seasons we measured.
A stopped car decided the Grand Prix
Norris started first and had the race under control. Stroll's Aston Martin stopped on track and brought out the virtual safety car, which is the lap on which a pit stop costs less time than on any other. Kimi Antonelli pitted to take advantage of it. Norris went past the pit entry at exactly that moment, and by the time the race settled again he had lost two places, from the lead to 3rd. The Italian won.
Besides his, the cars that never saw the flag were Carlos Sainz, Sergio Pérez and Lewis Hamilton. The full race, with all twenty two and with what we had predicted before it was run, is on the Grand Prix page.
Hamilton loses a 14 race streak
Madrid was the first race of 2026 where Hamilton came away with nothing, and it ends a run of 14 straight Grands Prix in the points. That run began on the final weekend of 2025: the time before this that he scored nothing was Qatar 2025, and he did not even retire that day, he finished twelfth. For his last retirement you have to go back to São Paulo 2025.
Measured against his career it is rarer than it looks. He has 35 retirements in 394 Grands Prix since 2007, or 8.9% of the times he has got in the car. He is still 3rd in the championship on 191 points, so Sunday cost him a good deal more than one bad result.
The three still on zero
The harshest number of the season belongs to the man who brought out the virtual safety car. Lance Stroll has retired from 10 of the 14 races he has started. He has not finished even half the year and has not scored once.
He shares that column with 2 other drivers: Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas, the two Cadillacs. His team mate Alonso has retired 5 times and scraped 3 points, which is the difference between a bad season and a blank one.
| Driver | Team | Retirements | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lance Stroll | Aston Martin | 10 of 14 | 0 |
| Valtteri Bottas | Cadillac | 6 of 14 | 0 |
| Fernando Alonso | Aston Martin | 5 of 14 | 3 |
| Sergio Pérez | Cadillac | 5 of 14 | 0 |
| Alexander Albon | Williams | 4 of 13 | 5 |
| Oliver Bearman | Haas | 4 of 14 | 18 |
| Max Verstappen | Red Bull | 4 of 14 | 145 |
| Nico Hülkenberg | Audi | 3 of 13 | 7 |
Verstappen shows up there with 4 retirements and 145 points, and that is what has changed from other years: breaking down has stopped being something that happens to the teams at the back.
The biggest reliability swing in the series
We counted retirements against starts for every season since 2005, using the same rule throughout. 2026 is on 59 retirements from 301 starts, or 19.6%. Last year was 10.7%.
| Year | Starts | Retirements | % of starts |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 371 | 74 | 19.9% |
| 2016 | 457 | 79 | 17.3% |
| 2017 | 399 | 94 | 23.6% |
| 2018 | 420 | 82 | 19.5% |
| 2019 | 419 | 57 | 13.6% |
| 2020 | 338 | 55 | 16.3% |
| 2021 | 437 | 55 | 12.6% |
| 2022 | 439 | 73 | 16.6% |
| 2023 | 435 | 59 | 13.6% |
| 2024 | 476 | 49 | 10.3% |
| 2025 | 476 | 51 | 10.7% |
| 2026 (ongoing) | 301 | 59 | 19.6% |
From 2025 to 2026 retirements jump 8.9 points in one go, and that is the largest year on year rise in the whole series, ahead of 2006, which rose 8.0. To find a season that broke down more in absolute terms you have to go back to 2017 (23.6%), and the contrast is with 2024, the most reliable of the 22 years measured, at 10.3%.
The likely cause is the usual one when this happens: new regulations. The 2026 cars introduce a new power unit and a new chassis at the same time, and the first year of a technical era is the year when the parts have not yet done the mileage. What makes it interesting is that we were coming from the exact opposite. In our count of the biggest comebacks we found that big charges through the field have all but vanished from modern F1, and the reason was precisely that nobody breaks down any more. 2026 has reversed that in one go.
Antonelli, the exception
While half the grid fights to see the flag, Kimi Antonelli has one retirement in 14 races. He has 8 wins, 12 podiums and 292 points, and is 81 clear of George Russell, who is his own team mate. He is 20. There are 9 races left, so the title is not settled, but this year the gap between him and the rest looks a lot like the gap between finishing and not finishing.