After the Belgian Grand Prix, Andrea Kimi Antonelli remains the season’s biggest net loser of grid-to-flag positions at −12, even as Isack Hadjar rockets down the table on the back of a huge recovery drive from 21st to 6th.
By Diego Torres
Ten races into 2026, Andrea Kimi Antonelli remains the driver who has shed the most net places across the season, holding P1 on the ‘Most positions lost’ table at −12 after Spa. The crucial detail is that Belgium didn’t add to that total: Antonelli started from pole (grid 1) and finished 1st, completing 44 laps and taking 25 points, a clean zero-change race that protects his lead rather than stretching it.
That steadiness matters because the chasing pack is tight by comparison. George Russell sits second at −6 and Charles Leclerc third at −2, which underlines how Antonelli’s −12 has become a distinctive outlier even without a leadership change at round 10. Spa, then, wasn’t about a new name at the top; it was about how one extraordinary overtake-filled result elsewhere in the field can swing the mid-table of this ranking dramatically while the leader simply banks another ‘no damage’ Sunday.
The biggest mover after Spa is Isack Hadjar, and the direction is counterintuitive for a ‘most positions lost’ list: he plummets from 4th to 19th because he gained so much ground on race day. Starting 21st and finishing 6th is a net +15 places in a single classified race, a massive correction in a metric that punishes losses and rewards recoveries by pushing you away from the top.
Hadjar’s new season figure reads +15, and that single number explains the scale of the ranking swing. In a table where the leader is on −12 and third place is on −2, a +15 season total sits on the other side of the spectrum entirely. Spa therefore functions like a reset button: one standout climb can erase the kind of accumulated ‘lost places’ footprint that keeps a driver near the wrong end of this leaderboard.
Spa’s ripple effect was felt in the top 10 too, with Arvid Lindblad and Oliver Bearman becoming new entrants. Lindblad rises from 11th to 6th with a season value of +4, while Bearman jumps from 12th to 8th with +6. Those are season-long totals, but Belgium provides a neat snapshot for Lindblad: he started 7th and finished 9th over 44 laps for a net −2 on the day, showing how a single weekend can still be a small backward step even as the broader season picture looks like net recovery.
Two names drop out of the top 10 as a consequence: Isack Hadjar and Lando Norris. Hadjar’s exit is straightforward—his +15 season movement is the exact opposite of what this list rewards at the top end. Norris’s exit is subtler, but still telling: he slides from 8th to 13th with a season value of +11, meaning his 2026 has, on balance, been defined more by regaining ground than losing it, pushing him away from the ‘most lost’ cluster.
The top of the ranking is now defined by contrast: Antonelli’s −12 at P1 exists in a different bracket to Russell’s −6 and Leclerc’s −2, and Spa reinforced that separation not through new losses but by denying the others an obvious opportunity to close it via Antonelli having another place-losing Sunday. When the leader converts grid 1 into P1, the only way the gap changes is through upheaval elsewhere—exactly what Hadjar produced, but in the direction that ejects him from contention here.
The table also hints at a developing rhythm. With a ‘streak’ signal active after round 10 and a maximum movement magnitude of 15 this week, Spa stands as a reminder that this metric can swing quickly when a driver either salvages a weekend from deep on the grid or, conversely, watches positions bleed away. For now, Antonelli’s lead in the wrong-way ranking is secure on raw gap alone, but the midfield churn—Lindblad and Bearman entering the top 10 as Hadjar and Norris depart—shows how fluid everything beneath P1 remains.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Isack Hadjar | Red Bull | 4 | 19 | -15 | +15 |
| Arvid Lindblad | RB F1 Team | 11 | 6 | +5 | +4 |
| Lando Norris | McLaren | 8 | 13 | -5 | +11 |
Antonelli’s −12 still sets the benchmark for this unwanted metric, and his grid-1-to-win at Spa prevented any easy compression of that gap. But Hadjar’s +15 swing shows how quickly one weekend can rewrite the midfield of the table, making the fight for the top-10 places in ‘Most positions lost’ far more volatile than the lead itself.