After the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Fernando Alonso’s season-long lap-one comeback total remains the benchmark at +30. The biggest shuffle came lower down: Alexander Albon climbed into ninth, while Franco Colapinto and Valtteri Bottas slid back two places each.
By Nadia Okafor
Fernando Alonso’s grip on the ‘Most positions gained on lap one’ ranking survived Baku unchanged, and that matters because this is a cumulative season story rather than a one-off highlight reel. Through 15 completed races, Alonso remains P1 on +30 for Aston Martin, with no leader change flagged after the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
The immediate pressure still comes from behind: Esteban Ocon sits second on +27 for Haas, and Carlos Sainz is third on +26 for Williams. That top three staying fixed is telling in itself — the front of this ranking is now about marginal swings and consolidation rather than dramatic weekly lead changes.
The notable mover in the ranking was Alexander Albon, who jumped from 11th to ninth on +15 for Williams. The contrast is that his Azerbaijan Grand Prix result reads brutally — grid 12, retired (classified 20th) after 29 laps — yet this metric only cares about what happens by the end of lap 1, then accumulates those gains across the season.
That’s the point of the ranking’s methodology: races without lap-1 timing are excluded, but where the lap-1 number exists it can still add value even if the race later unravels. Albon’s rise into the top 10 also coincided with a notable exit from that group, with Pierre Gasly dropping out, underlining how small movements can have outsized consequences once you’re hovering around the cut line.
Franco Colapinto took the biggest hit among the key movers, falling two places from fifth to seventh while still sitting on +20 for Alpine. Baku was a reminder of how quickly a solid season-long tally can be overtaken when the midfield pack is tight: a two-position slide doesn’t require a collapse, just someone else finding a better opening-lap pattern across the year.
Valtteri Bottas also dropped two spots, from 14th to 16th, and he is the outlier of the group on raw output: his season sum now sits at -2 for Cadillac. That negative total is a different kind of pressure, because it suggests that even a single strong opening-lap sequence in the remaining races could materially change his ranking position — but right now it leaves him vulnerable to anyone around him putting together even modest positive gains.
Baku didn’t redraw the very top, but it did reinforce a broader theme: this ranking is increasingly being decided in the narrow spaces between drivers separated by a handful of cumulative places. With Alonso still on +30 and the next two on +27 and +26, the front is close enough that the next set of races can matter without requiring headline-grabbing swings.
One piece of race-weekend context underlines why lap-one execution remains such a differentiator: there were seven retirements in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. That kind of attrition can distort full-race narratives, but it doesn’t erase what this table is tracking — the repeatability of gaining (or losing) ground immediately from the grid, before the race turns into something else.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alexander Albon | Williams | 11 | 9 | +2 | +15 |
| Franco Colapinto | Alpine F1 Team | 5 | 7 | -2 | +20 |
| Valtteri Bottas | Cadillac F1 Team | 14 | 16 | -2 | -2 |
With the top three unchanged — Alonso +30, Ocon +27, Sainz +26 — the ranking is now about incremental gains and holding position. Albon’s move into ninth on +15 shows how quickly the top-10 cut line can shift, while Colapinto’s slide to seventh and Bottas’s drop to 16th underline that a couple of small swings can reshape the mid-table even when the leader stands still.