Liam Lawson’s +5.33 average improvement now tops the 2026 table after Monaco, with Lewis Hamilton displaced from P1. George Russell’s slide to 11th makes him the week’s biggest faller and the only top-10 exit.
By Julian Reyes
Liam Lawson is the new benchmark in the ‘Biggest improvement vs qualifying’ ranking after the Monaco Grand Prix, taking over the points of reference with a season average of +5.33. That change at the top matters because it didn’t just reshuffle the top few positions — it removed Lewis Hamilton from a lead he’d held to this point, with Hamilton now down to fourth on +1.17.
Lawson’s Monaco return underlines the kind of weekend this metric rewards: 10th in qualifying and 6th in the race, eight points banked over 78 laps. Because the calculation uses qualifying position rather than the starting grid, it isolates the repeated pattern of turning modest Saturdays into stronger Sundays — and after six races completed, Lawson has built a lead that dwarfs the next-best figures of +2.33 held by both Oscar Piastri and Pierre Gasly.
The other defining shift is Mercedes’ downturn in the ranking. George Russell drops five places from sixth to 11th on −1.40 — the biggest movement in either direction this week and the only top-10 exit — while Andrea Kimi Antonelli slides four spots from fourth to eighth despite still being fractionally positive at +0.17. With only six rounds in the books, that’s a meaningful warning sign: any driver drifting into negative territory needs multiple strong recovery weekends just to get back to neutral, let alone challenge the top.
Behind the headline movers, the edges of the top 10 also shifted. Franco Colapinto sits ninth at 0.00, a knife-edge that shows how narrow the mid-table is, and Isack Hadjar rounds out the top 10 on −0.67 — already a reminder that being ‘in’ the top 10 here doesn’t necessarily mean a net gain across the season, only that others have fallen further.
| 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 | 1 | 4 | -3 | +1.17 |
With six races completed, Lawson’s +5.33 puts clear daylight between him and the +2.33 pair of Piastri and Gasly, while Hamilton’s fall to fourth resets the chase. Russell dropping to 11th on −1.40 and Antonelli’s slide to +0.17 show how quickly one poor trend can push drivers out of the top 10 in a ranking built on season-long consistency.