A four-place recovery from 11th to 7th was enough to swing the season-long grid-to-finish movement crown to Liam Lawson. Behind him, Arvid Lindblad’s 22nd-to-10th surge reshaped the top three.
By Elena Marsh
Liam Lawson is the new leader of the 2026 Most positions gained ranking after the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia at Sepang, overturning the previous advantage held by Max Verstappen. The margin is as tight as it gets in a season-long movement metric: Lawson now sits on +32 for RB F1 Team, with Verstappen immediately behind on +31 for Red Bull.
That lead change is rooted in exactly what this ranking measures: places recovered from grid position to final classification in races where a driver is classified and starts from a proper grid slot. At Sepang, Lawson converted a P11 start into P7 at the flag across 55 laps, a net gain of four positions that nudged him past Verstappen in the cumulative totals.
The most significant structural shift in the standings came from Arvid Lindblad. Starting 22nd and finishing 10th, Lindblad produced the biggest grid-to-finish gain of the race at +12, and it translated directly into a jump from seventh to third in the season ranking. His total is now +26, and the scale of that single recovery explains why the top three changed even though the lead fight remains a one-position swing on paper (+32 versus +31).
There’s an intriguing internal RB F1 Team subplot forming inside a metric that usually cuts across team narratives. Lawson leads the entire table, and Lindblad now sits third; between them is Verstappen, who remains second. With the season tally built from repeated recoveries rather than a single headline drive, Lindblad’s 22nd-to-10th shows how one outsized comeback can reframe the season picture when the gaps are this small.
Franco Colapinto delivered the kind of steady, compounding progress that often decides these lists over 16 races. He climbed three places in the ranking itself, from 10th to 7th, and now sits on +19 for Alpine F1 Team—close enough to keep the battle for the top group alive as the season total grows round by round.
Fernando Alonso was another clear beneficiary of the latest update, moving from 11th to ninth with a +15 total for Aston Martin, while Nico Hülkenberg holds 10th on +12 for Audi. The flip side is that the top-10 cutoff tightened: Lando Norris and Carlos Sainz are now listed as top-10 exits, reflecting how quickly a mid-table season total can be overtaken when others string together consistent recovery races.
Gabriel Bortoleto suffered the biggest ranking drop of the week, falling five places from 15th to 20th, and he’s now on -3 for Audi. Sepang was a clear example of how this metric punishes lost track position: Bortoleto started 10th and finished 18th over 55 laps, the kind of negative swing that drags down a season sum built on small margins.
Norris and Sainz also moved backward in the table—each down three places, to 11th (+9) and 12th (+8) respectively—illustrating that you can still be net-positive on the year while slipping relative to the field. With 16 races completed, the story is no longer about isolated Sundays; it’s about whether drivers can keep banking modest gains often enough to withstand one bad grid-to-flag reversal.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gabriel Bortoleto | Audi | 15 | 20 | -5 | -3 |
| Arvid Lindblad | RB F1 Team | 7 | 3 | +4 | +26 |
| Franco Colapinto | Alpine F1 Team | 10 | 7 | +3 | +19 |
With Lawson only one position ahead of Verstappen on the season total (+32 to +31), the Most positions gained lead is effectively on a knife-edge. Lindblad’s leap to third on +26 compresses the chasing pack behind them, while the top-10 cutoff has become volatile enough that a single grid-to-flag swing—positive or negative—can flip who’s in and who’s out.