After the Chinese Grand Prix, Andrea Kimi Antonelli replaced George Russell at the head of the 2026 ‘Most positions lost’ ranking — with both Mercedes drivers still on 0 net places shed. Max Verstappen’s Shanghai slide, from P8 to a retirement classified 16th, sent him sharply the other way.
By Camille Fontaine
The ‘Most positions lost’ lead changed hands after Shanghai, but in a way that underlines how early-season this table still is. Andrea Kimi Antonelli moved from second to first on 0 net positions lost across the season, demoting previous leader George Russell to second — also on 0. Antonelli’s Chinese Grand Prix was the cleanest possible entry for this metric: pole position to victory (grid 1st, finish 1st) across 56 laps for 25 points, leaving him with no deficit to add to his season tally.
The biggest swing in the ranking came from Max Verstappen, who fell four places from sixth to 10th and now sits on +14 positions lost for the season. That figure was turbocharged by his Shanghai result alone: he started eighth and was classified 16th as a retirement after 45 laps, an eight-place net loss that heavily tilts a cumulative table built on grid-to-flag movement. In a ranking where a single difficult Sunday can outweigh multiple steady ones, this was the kind of result that rewrites the early narrative.
Lewis Hamilton also moved the wrong way, dropping from fifth to seventh with a season figure of +3 positions lost for Ferrari. And while the top three itself did not change — Antonelli, Russell, then Charles Leclerc on +1 — the broader top-10 picture is starting to form, with Oliver Bearman (+5) and Liam Lawson (+7) among the names currently carrying the biggest early totals inside that group. Two rounds in, the spread from 0 at the top to +14 at 10th shows how quickly this ranking can diverge based purely on where a driver starts versus where they end up.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max Verstappen | Red Bull | 6 | 10 | -4 | +14 |
| Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 5 | 7 | -2 | +3 |
| Andrea Kimi Antonelli | Mercedes | 2 | 1 | +1 | 0 |
With Antonelli and Russell both still on 0, the lead is effectively a dead heat, and the first real separation at the top will come from whichever of them is forced into a net loss. Verstappen’s jump to +14 shows how a single round can create a sizeable deficit to erase in a cumulative grid-to-finish ranking.