After 11 races, Andrea Kimi Antonelli still leads the 2026 ‘Most positions lost’ table on −8, with Mercedes team-mate George Russell close behind on −7. Hungary underlined the odd tension in this metric: Antonelli moved forward on Sunday, yet still tops a season-long count of net grid-to-finish slippage.
By Camille Fontaine
Andrea Kimi Antonelli remains the leader of the 2026 ‘Most positions lost’ ranking after the Hungarian Grand Prix at the Hungaroring, and the lead did not change. His season aggregate sits at −8 after 11 races, holding off George Russell on −7 in a uniquely tight intra-team fight at Mercedes, with Charles Leclerc third on −4.
That top-three stability matters because this table isn’t about one bad Sunday; it’s a running total of how much ground is shed from grid position to final classification across the season, excluding pit-lane starts. With the ordering unchanged after Budapest, the story shifts from volatility to consolidation: Antonelli is still the reference point for the wrong kind of movement, but Russell is near enough that a single swing in either direction could flip the lead the moment results start cutting against one driver’s typical grid-to-flag pattern.
Hungary offered a neat illustration of why this ranking needs context: Antonelli’s headline number for the season is negative, but his Sunday was a recovery. He started 7th and finished 3rd, completed all 70 laps, and scored 15 points — a gain in track position even if it doesn’t erase what has built up earlier in the year.
The detail beneath it also highlights the difference between one-lap speed and race outcome in this measurement. Antonelli’s qualifying position was 4th, yet his grid slot was 7th, and it was from there that the places were made back. In a ranking that punishes lost ground across every classified race, being forced to recover at all can be a recurring theme: it may look like forward progress on a given Sunday, but the season ledger can still carry the weight of earlier weekends where the direction went the other way.
Russell sitting second on −7 makes this less about a runaway ‘leader’ and more about a compressed fight where the top spot is always one swing away. With both Mercedes drivers occupying first and second, the table reads like a team story as much as an individual one: two drivers in the same environment separated by a single net place across an entire 11-race sample.
Leclerc’s −4 in third provides the next important marker. It’s not close enough to be an immediate threat to the Mercedes pair, but it is close enough to frame a clear tiering: a leading duo clustered together, then a gap down to Ferrari’s representative. If the top stays locked and the rest remain in that second band, the ranking becomes a tracker of whether Mercedes’ weekends are trending toward cleaner conversions from grid to finish — or whether the season continues to leave both drivers with too many Sundays that slip away relative to starting position.
The simplest signal from Budapest is continuity: no change at the top and no change in the top three. With 11 races now completed, that steadiness starts to carry analytical weight, because it suggests the season-to-date pattern is hardening rather than resetting week to week.
From here, the key is not to treat a single comeback — even a 7th-to-3rd climb like Antonelli’s in Hungary — as proof the season-long negative number is about to vanish. This metric accumulates relentlessly, and tight gaps like −8 versus −7 mean the next meaningful storyline could be as small as one driver finishing just a few places behind their grid slot while the other converts cleanly. In other words: the table is set up for the lead to change quickly, but it hasn’t happened yet.
With Antonelli on −8 and Russell on −7, the ‘Most positions lost’ lead is effectively a one-swing margin. The top three staying unchanged after Hungary suggests the early-season pattern is stabilising — but also that a modest grid-to-finish slip for one Mercedes driver, paired with a clean conversion for the other, would be enough to reshuffle the top spot.