Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s advantage at the top of the Points from outside the top 10 ranking held firm after the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia. The bigger change came behind: Fernando Alonso’s 12th-to-8th recovery added 4 points and launched him into the top 10, pushing Lando Norris out.
By Camille Fontaine
Andrea Kimi Antonelli remains the reference point in this metric: 35 points scored in races where he started 11th or lower (or from the pit lane), and no change in leadership after Sepang. That matters because this table isn’t about outright pace in clean air; it’s about how often a driver can turn an off-day in qualifying into something meaningful on Sunday.
Sepang itself underlined why Antonelli’s lead is hard to chip away at. He started 3rd and finished 2nd for 18 points, but those points don’t count toward this ranking because the grid slot was inside the top 10. So for anyone chasing him here, it’s not enough to score big points overall — they need those points to come specifically from outside the top 10.
Fernando Alonso produced the weekend’s clearest ‘outside-the-top-10’ points story: he started 12th and finished 8th, banking 4 championship points that do count for this table. Those 4 points took his outside-top-10 total to 7 and sparked the biggest rank change among the key movers: up five places from 15th to 10th for Aston Martin.
That jump also carried a knock-on effect for the boundary line. The ranking only lists drivers who have at least one start outside the top 10, so every point scored from P11 or lower can reshape the midfield of this table quickly. Alonso’s move into 10th is a reminder that consistency in ‘damage limitation’ races can be just as valuable here as one standout recovery drive.
Lando Norris is the name that drops out of the top 10 after Sepang: down one place from 10th to 11th on 6 points. His Malaysia result tells you why this ranking can be unforgiving — Norris started 5th and finished 9th for 2 points, but none of it helps his total here because the start was inside the top 10.
Just behind Norris, Franco Colapinto also lost a place, slipping from 11th to 12th on 5 points for Alpine F1 Team. And Nico Hülkenberg, also on 5 points, fell from 12th to 13th for Audi. With ties broken by total season points and then alphabetically, the margins in this section are fine; one ‘outside-the-top-10’ points finish can flip multiple positions at once.
This metric rewards a specific kind of weekend: when qualifying leaves you 11th or worse, you still find a way to bring points back. Alonso’s 12th-to-8th swing is exactly that — a four-place gain that converted a non-Q3 starting spot into a points-paying finish, and it’s why his total moved immediately.
It also highlights the constraint on the rest of the field: you can’t climb this ranking from races like Antonelli’s P3-to-P2, or Norris’s P5-to-P9, because those starts don’t qualify. The result is a table that can stay stable at the top — Antonelli’s lead didn’t change, nor did the top three — while the lower end churns whenever someone converts a rare ‘bad grid’ Sunday into points.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fernando Alonso | Aston Martin | 15 | 10 | +5 | 7 |
| Lando Norris | McLaren | 10 | 11 | -1 | 6 |
| Franco Colapinto | Alpine F1 Team | 11 | 12 | -1 | 5 |
Antonelli’s 35-point cushion at the top remains intact because Malaysia offered him no ‘outside top-10 start’ chance to add — and didn’t give rivals an obvious opening either. The bigger takeaway is the volatility around the top-10 cutoff: Alonso’s move to 7 points was enough to enter at P10 and force Norris down to P11, while Colapinto and Hülkenberg sit on 5 points with the kind of totals that can be overtaken quickly by one points finish from P11 or lower.