Liam Lawson’s climb from 10th on the grid to 6th at Monaco has flipped the season-long “Best average positions gained” lead, nudging Max Verstappen down to second. Further back, Mercedes suffered the sharpest ranking hit as George Russell dropped out of the top 10 entirely.
By Nadia Okafor
The “Best average positions gained” ranking has a new leader after the Monaco Grand Prix: Liam Lawson. His Monaco result — starting 10th and finishing 6th over 78 laps — added a clean, concrete +4 gain to a metric built purely on grid position minus final classification. That was enough to take his season average to +5.33 and move him ahead of the previous leader, Max Verstappen.
That swing matters because this table rewards repeatable recovery rather than one-off headline gains, and it is sensitive to the official grid. In other words, you don’t have to win races to top it; you have to keep turning your Sundays into net forward movement. Six rounds into 2026, Lawson has done that often enough to edge Verstappen’s +4.25, resetting the benchmark for what “best” looks like in this ranking.
The lead change doesn’t just shuffle the top two; it reshapes the early-season picture of who consistently gains ground. Verstappen is now second on +4.25, and Oscar Piastri holds third at +2.33. That top-three spread shows how quickly the curve drops: Lawson’s +5.33 isn’t just first place, it’s a distinct level above the rest of the podium in average positions gained.
There’s also a notable compression further down. Pierre Gasly is fourth with the same +2.33 as Piastri, meaning third is being decided on tie-breaks beyond the value itself. In a ranking that already filters out drivers with fewer than three counted races, this kind of cluster suggests small swings in any single grand prix can reorder the chasing group even without a dramatic headline story.
Monaco’s biggest negative storyline in this ranking belongs to George Russell. He went from 6th to 11th in the standings, a five-place drop that also made him the week’s top-10 exit. The number attached to it is stark: −1.40 average positions gained, a metric that reads as a season-long net loss of places rather than recovery.
Russell’s Monaco race provides a direct illustration of how this ranking punishes lost ground: he started 6th and finished 12th, completing 78 laps but ending with 0 points. That’s −6 on the day by the ranking’s definition, and it’s the kind of swing that can undo weeks of marginal gains — especially once the sample size reaches six races and the averages begin to stabilise.
Russell wasn’t the only Mercedes driver to slide. Andrea Kimi Antonelli dropped four places in the ranking, from 4th to 8th, even though his season average is still slightly positive at +0.17. That makes his movement feel like a warning light rather than a collapse: the cushion is thin, and any weekend that goes backward on grid-to-flag movement can flip that average into negative territory.
Lewis Hamilton also moved the wrong way, falling from 2nd to 5th with a +1.17 average. The significance here is positional: second place in this table implies consistent Sunday recovery, so dropping three spots suggests the margin to the front is being set by a higher standard. Around them, there were small but telling signals too — Franco Colapinto sits ninth on 0.00, while Isack Hadjar is 10th on −0.67 — illustrating how the top 10 now contains both neutral and net-negative season movers, and how quickly a driver can be pushed out when the numbers turn.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| George Russell | Mercedes | 6 | 11 | -5 | −1.40 |
| Andrea Kimi Antonelli | Mercedes | 4 | 8 | -4 | +0.17 |
| Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 2 | 5 | -3 | +1.17 |
Lawson’s Monaco gain from 10th to 6th has turned a strong season-long trend into a clear lead at +5.33, but Verstappen’s +4.25 keeps the fight live. With Piastri and Gasly both on +2.33, the next meaningful swing in grid-to-finish movement could reorder the podium places quickly, while Russell’s fall to 11th shows how one backward weekend can eject even an established top-10 runner.