The Momentum ranking flips at the top after round 6: Isack Hadjar replaces Oscar Piastri as the driver improving fastest versus his earlier-season scoring rate. Monaco also produced the biggest single swing of the list, with Lando Norris dropping 16 places.
By Julian Reyes
Isack Hadjar is the new leader of the Momentum ranking after the Monaco Grand Prix, jumping to P1 with a +6.00 momentum score and displacing previous leader Oscar Piastri. This metric isn’t a championship table; it’s a form indicator, measuring how much a driver’s points-per-race over the most recent 3 rounds has improved (or worsened) compared to their average across every earlier round.
Hadjar’s Monaco weekend underlined that rise rather than merely describing it. From P5 on the grid he finished P4, banked 12 points, and completed all 78 laps at the Circuit de Monaco. That points haul matters here because it feeds directly into the last-three-rounds sample that is now outpacing his earlier-season scoring rate by the biggest margin in the field.
The headline might be Hadjar’s takeover, but the margins underneath show why this ranking feels volatile after 6 races. Max Verstappen sits P2 on +4.33, and Franco Colapinto is P3 on the exact same +4.33, with the tie broken by total season points and then alphabetically. In other words, the top three has changed, but the gap from second to third is effectively procedural rather than performance-based on this measure.
Piastri’s drop from P1 to P5 despite still posting a positive +2.33 is the other part of the story: he hasn’t “gone cold” on this metric, but others have simply accelerated harder over the last three rounds. That’s a key nuance of momentum as defined here—drivers can be improving and still lose ground if rivals improve more.
Monaco produced the biggest movement magnitude of the season so far on this ranking: Lando Norris fell 16 places, from P3 to P19, and is now negative at −0.67. His Monaco result in the facts is stark—he started P8, retired after 43 laps, and scored 0 points—so his most recent three-round points rate has now slipped below what he was averaging earlier in the year.
At the other end of the swing, Lewis Hamilton delivered the week’s most dramatic rise: up 15 places from P19 to P4 for Ferrari, on a +3.00 momentum score. He backed that up in Monaco itself with a P2 finish from P3 on the grid, scoring 18 points over 78 laps, a result strong enough to reset his short-term scoring pace versus his pre-recent baseline.
Liam Lawson also continued the theme of sharp upward corrections, climbing 8 places from P15 to P7 with +2.00 for RB F1 Team. In a ranking built to capture shifts rather than raw totals, those jumps matter because they signal that the last three rounds are telling a different story than the opening part of the season.
The top 10 complexion changed on both sides. Hamilton’s surge landed him straight into P4, and Lawson rose into P7; Alpine’s Pierre Gasly climbed from P17 to P9 with +1.33, while RB F1 Team’s Arvid Lindblad now occupies P10 on +0.67. That gives the top 10 a distinctly mixed feel: some drivers are surging with clearly positive numbers, while the back end is being decided by fractional gains.
Those climbs came at a cost to the drivers who were previously occupying that space. Lando Norris, Esteban Ocon, Carlos Sainz, and Fernando Alonso are the four names listed as top-10 exits after Monaco, a reminder that momentum is a moving window: one bad round inside the last-three sample can change the picture quickly, even when the season is only 6 races old.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lando Norris | McLaren | 3 | 19 | -16 | −0.67 |
| Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 19 | 4 | +15 | +3.00 |
| Liam Lawson | RB F1 Team | 15 | 7 | +8 | +2.00 |
With Hadjar now on +6.00, the Momentum ranking’s message after Monaco is that Red Bull has the benchmark short-term trajectory — but the gaps are small enough behind that Verstappen and Colapinto (+4.33) remain within striking distance on form. The larger story is volatility: Norris sliding to −0.67 and Hamilton surging to P4 show how one round can reshape the last-three-races picture, and the top-10 turnover suggests the next few races could keep reordering the ‘who’s trending’ narrative even without any change in the underlying methodology.