Round 9 at Silverstone flips the top of the 2026 Power ranking, with Liam Lawson moving to P1 on 75.5 ahead of Max Verstappen’s 71.9. The biggest single swing came from Andrea Kimi Antonelli, down seven places to P12 after a result that hammered the score’s grid-to-finish and consistency pillars.
By Elena Marsh
The British Grand Prix has produced a new leader in the 2026 Power ranking: Liam Lawson. His 75.5 composite score puts the RB F1 Team driver P1 after round 9, with the previous leader Max Verstappen now P2 on 71.9 — a meaningful swing in a metric that heavily rewards intra-team head-to-heads (40%) and positions gained from grid to finish (30%).
Lawson’s own Silverstone weekend maps neatly onto that scoring DNA. From 10th on the grid to 6th at the flag over 52 laps, he banked 8 points and a four-place gain that helps the positions-gained component without needing any context beyond the official classification. In a ranking that also demands a minimum sample (at least 3 counted races/sessions per component, or you’re excluded entirely), that kind of clean, classified return matters just as much as peaks: reliability and finish consistency account for a combined 20%.
Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s drop is the round’s headline mover: down seven places from P5 to P12, ending the weekend on 40.6. The raw result is stark — pole position (qualifying P1) but classified 15th, finishing and scoring 0 points across 52 laps — and in this scoring model that is a double hit.
First, the grid-to-finish component punishes losing places, and a fall from 1st to 15th is the largest kind of negative swing it can capture. Second, consistency is explicitly measured by how tightly a driver’s classified finishes cluster around their own season mean; a 15th-place classification is exactly the sort of outlier that widens that spread. The methodology doesn’t look at lap times, tyres, stops, or penalties, so the only story it can tell is what the results say: an elite starting slot followed by a deeply damaging finish, and a ranking correction that follows.
Behind Lawson and Verstappen, the top three is reshuffled with Sergio Pérez now P3 on 62.7 for Cadillac F1 Team. The notable part isn’t simply Pérez’s presence; it’s the spread: from Lawson’s 75.5 to Pérez’s 62.7 is a sizeable gap, emphasising how much of the early-season ‘power’ picture is being defined by the top two’s stronger composite profiles.
Pierre Gasly is the other big winner near the front, climbing two places from P6 to P4 on 60.2 for Alpine F1 Team. His Silverstone classification tells you why this ranking likes it: 15th on the grid, 10th at the finish, 1 point scored — a five-place gain that directly feeds the 30% positions-gained slice and also adds another classified finish to the reliability share. In a format that blends team head-to-head, qualifying position and race outcomes into one 0–100 score, Gasly’s kind of upward mobility is the quickest way to move.
The top 10’s edge shifted as well. Esteban Ocon (Haas F1 Team) sits P8 on 50.7 and Gabriel Bortoleto (Audi) P9 on 46.3, with both appearing as top-10 entrants after Silverstone. In a composite model with thresholds and scaling from best to worst across the season’s field, edging into the top 10 can be as much about avoiding weak weekends as it is about chasing headline scores.
Three drivers fell out: Andrea Kimi Antonelli, George Russell and Isack Hadjar. Hadjar’s slide is the second-largest movement of the round, down five from P10 to P15 on 33.5 for Red Bull, underlining how quickly a marginal top-10 foothold can disappear when the scoring leans on repeatable, cross-weekend performance. Oscar Piastri’s drop is less dramatic in rank but sharp in context: down four from P3 to P7 on 51.5 for McLaren, while teammate Lando Norris moved up one from P7 to P6 on 52.6 — a small intra-team reversal that matters in a ranking where teammate head-to-head is the single biggest component.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andrea Kimi Antonelli | Mercedes | 5 | 12 | -7 | 40.6 |
| Isack Hadjar | Red Bull | 10 | 15 | -5 | 33.5 |
| Oscar Piastri | McLaren | 3 | 7 | -4 | 51.5 |
Lawson’s rise to P1 on 75.5 turns the top of the Power ranking into a direct benchmark against Verstappen’s 71.9, while the volatility behind them is the bigger story: Antonelli’s plunge to P12 and Hadjar’s exit from the top 10 show how quickly the composite can punish a single bad grid-to-finish swing and reward drivers, like Gasly, who keep adding classified finishes while moving forward.