Nine races into 2026, Liam Lawson still tops the Best average positions gained ranking at +5.00, but the British GP’s biggest mover was Andrea Kimi Antonelli — in the wrong direction. His drop from 7th to 15th highlights how quickly one grid-to-flag swing can rewrite an averages-based table.
By Elena Marsh
Liam Lawson remains the reference point in 2026’s Best average positions gained metric after Silverstone, holding rank 1 on +5.00. The headline shift around him wasn’t a change of leader — it was the weekend’s most violent hit to the table: Andrea Kimi Antonelli tumbling eight places, from 7th to 15th, to a season average of −1.50.
That contrast captures why this ranking is such a brutal barometer of race-day recovery. It’s not about who qualifies well; it’s about who consistently converts their official grid slot into forward progress. At Silverstone, Lawson again embodied that: he started 10th and finished 6th across 52 laps, a four-place gain that sustains his +5.00 average. Antonelli did the opposite, turning pole (grid 1) into 15th at the flag — a 14-place loss in a single classified finish — and the averages punished him immediately.
Lawson’s lead looks solid on raw value, but the chase has layers. Esteban Ocon sits 2nd on +4.67 and Sergio Pérez is 3rd on +3.67, and the top-three order has changed even though the leader hasn’t. That matters because this table rewards repeatability: any driver near the front can be displaced quickly if their race-to-race movement swings the wrong way, as Silverstone showed.
Behind that trio, the battle to stay inside the top 10 is tightening. Arvid Lindblad is 7th on +2.00 and Gabriel Bortoleto 9th on +1.33, both listed among the top-10 entrants after round 9. With the metric averaging only counted races and excluding anyone below the minimum of three, being in the mix isn’t about one spike — it’s about banking enough clean, classified recoveries to make the average stick.
Franco Colapinto produced the weekend’s standout recovery among the drivers flagged as movers, climbing from 9th to 6th in the ranking at +2.50. The datapoint that underpins that jump is simple and direct: he started 19th and finished 9th, a 10-place gain over 52 laps that also yielded 2 points. In an average-based ranking, a result like that doesn’t just look good in isolation — it drags the baseline upward across the season’s counted races.
The flipside was the kind of race that breaks an averages profile. Antonelli’s Silverstone numbers are as stark as they come: grid 1 to 15th, finished, 0 points. In a ranking designed to measure movement relative to the official grid (and therefore sensitive to anything that affects where you start), that single race can outweigh several smaller gains. It’s why his fall to 15th looks so steep: the methodology is relentlessly literal — start versus classification, averaged.
Four names dropped out of the top 10 after Silverstone: Lewis Hamilton, Antonelli, Isack Hadjar, and Charles Leclerc. Hamilton’s slide is a neat illustration of how this metric can tell a different story to the finish order alone. Even with a positive season average of +0.67, he fell six positions in the table from 5th to 11th, indicating that his set of counted races is no longer stacking up against the consistent gainers at the top.
Oscar Piastri is another cautionary tale. He was 3rd, now 8th — a five-place fall — despite still showing a positive +1.50 average. That’s the pressure point of an averages ranking after nine races: a driver can be “gaining” on average and still lose ground in the standings if others are compiling bigger per-race swings. With Lawson’s lead stable and the top three reshuffled, the fight is increasingly about avoiding the kind of backward weekend that forces you to spend multiple races rebuilding the average.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andrea Kimi Antonelli | Mercedes | 7 | 15 | -8 | −1.50 |
| Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 5 | 11 | -6 | +0.67 |
| Oscar Piastri | McLaren | 3 | 8 | -5 | +1.50 |
Lawson’s +5.00 average keeps him in control of the ranking’s top spot, but Silverstone proved how fragile everyone else’s position can be: a single grid-to-flag reversal can erase weeks of steady gains. With Ocon (+4.67) and Pérez (+3.67) close enough to keep pressure on, the next phase of this ranking will be defined less by occasional hero drives and more by who avoids Antonelli-style damage to their average — and who, like Colapinto, can stack another big recovery onto an already positive trend.