Six rounds in, Fernando Alonso still tops the season-long tally for positions gained on lap one at +22, with the Monaco weekend reshuffling the chasing pack behind him. Arvid Lindblad’s drop from third to sixth was the biggest hit among the key movers, even though his own total remains positive.
By Diego Torres
Fernando Alonso remains the reference point in this grid-to-lap-one metric after round 6 at Monaco: Aston Martin’s driver still leads the season total on +22. That matters because this ranking rewards repeatable recovery work rather than one-off heroics, and Alonso has now built a buffer over the next-best totals — Carlos Sainz is second on +16 and Esteban Ocon third on +14 — without needing a lead change to make the story move.
Monaco also underlined the scale of Alonso’s swings across a weekend. He started 21st and finished 10th, a net gain of 11 places by the chequered flag, but this table is stricter: it only counts grid position versus classified position at the end of lap 1, race by race, then sums it. With 6 races completed and a minimum of 3 counted races required, the fight behind Alonso is increasingly about who can keep adding small positives, not just avoiding the occasional negative.
The headline mover was Arvid Lindblad, whose ranking position fell three places — from third to sixth — despite still carrying a season total of +13 for RB F1 Team. That contradiction is exactly what makes this metric volatile in the midfield: a driver can keep a healthy cumulative number yet be overtaken if others add points faster, especially as the season reaches six rounds and more drivers clear the three-race minimum that makes their totals count.
At the front, the podium of the ranking is now Alonso (+22) from Sainz (+16) and Ocon (+14). The gaps are not enormous: Alonso’s advantage over second is six places’ worth of cumulative lap-one progress, and only eight over third. That keeps the pressure on every opening lap to continue yielding gains, because a couple of neutral or negative weekends can compress the order quickly under this scoring.
Lance Stroll and Sergio Pérez were the two notable risers in the overall table after Monaco, each moving up two places in the ranking. Stroll climbed from sixth to fourth on +14 for Aston Martin, while Pérez rose from seventh to fifth on +14 for Cadillac F1 Team, a neat illustration of how a single total can represent very different weekly paths — and how close the battle is once you get beyond the leader.
Stroll’s Monaco weekend also shows the separation between race result and lap-one accounting. He started 22nd and was classified as retired after 56 laps, scoring 0 points, but the lap-one ranking cares only about the position after lap 1 versus grid — and, over the season, he has still accumulated +14. That’s why this table can highlight drivers who consistently make early progress even when the final result doesn’t follow.
Not all drops are disasters in raw lap-one performance terms. Charles Leclerc slipped two places in the standings, from fifth to seventh, yet still sits on a positive +11 for Ferrari — a reminder that the pack behind the top three is crowded enough that even a stable total can be jumped by others’ incremental gains. Gabriel Bortoleto’s movement was harsher: he dropped three places, from 16th to 19th, and his season figure is -6 for Audi, leaving him with a deficit to dig out of under a method that never estimates missing lap-one data.
Even George Russell’s case underlines how the table can punish a tough run: he moved up two places from 18th to 16th while still showing -6 for Mercedes. In other words, you can improve your ranking slot without improving your underlying number, simply because the order around you is shifting as the season sample grows. With a “streak” signal still active in the data, the broader theme is consistency: the drivers who keep banking small positives are the ones most likely to keep climbing even when the headline totals change slowly.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arvid Lindblad | RB F1 Team | 3 | 6 | -3 | +13 |
| Gabriel Bortoleto | Audi | 16 | 19 | -3 | -6 |
| Lance Stroll | Aston Martin | 6 | 4 | +2 | +14 |
Alonso’s +22 total keeps him in control of this specific season-long lap-one metric, but the gaps behind are small enough that a couple of strong openings can reorder the top five quickly: Sainz is on +16, and a cluster sits on +14. For Lindblad (+13) and Leclerc (+11), the Monaco reshuffle is a reminder that maintaining a positive number isn’t always enough when others are still adding to theirs; for Bortoleto (-6), simply getting back to neutral is the first target before any climb up the standings.