How F1 points work: 25 for a win, nothing for P11

Updated 12 October 2026

F1 hands out points to the top 10 in every race, and finishing P11 gets you exactly what you'd get for staying at home: nothing. Those points add up over the season into 2 championships, one for drivers and one for teams.

Race points

The gap at the top is the point. A win pays 7 more than P2, so a driver who wins a lot pulls away even when the others keep finishing right behind.

Sprint points

Sprints are short Saturday races, about a third the length of a Grand Prix, and they pay the top 8. There are 6 of them in 2026.

No more point for the fastest lap

Until 2024, the driver who set the fastest lap got a bonus point as long as they finished in the top 10. It went for 2025, a season after a team brought Ricciardo in for new tyres near the end of the Singapore race purely to set the fastest lap and take that point away from Norris. Nobody missed it much.

So in Singapore 2026, Leclerc set the fastest lap of the race and scored 18 points for P2. Not 19.

2 championships

The drivers' championship is each driver's own total, and the constructors' championship adds up both of a team's cars. A team with 1 star and 1 driver making up the numbers will struggle there, which is why teams care about their second driver more than they let on.

A real weekend, added up

Singapore 2026 was a sprint weekend, so there were points on Saturday and on Sunday. Verstappen won the sprint for 8 and the Grand Prix for 25, which made 33, the most of anyone that weekend, and moved Verstappen from P6 to P4 in the championship.

Red Bull got those 33 plus 1 from Hadjar finishing the race P10. Ferrari scored more as a team that weekend, 39, because both of its cars kept scoring, and that's the constructors' championship in 1 sentence.

When it's level

If 2 drivers end the season on the same points, the one with more wins takes it. Still level? Then it's whoever has more P2 finishes, then more P3s, and so on down the order. F1 calls it countback.

When a race is stopped early

If a race is stopped and never restarted, the points shrink with how far the cars got, and 2 laps or fewer pays nothing at all. The rule exists because of Belgium 2021, when the cars did 2 laps behind the safety car in the rain and the FIA still handed out half points for it. Fans had paid for tickets to watch that.