Liam Lawson added 2 more points from a race started outside the top 10’s usual comfort zone, extending a lead that didn’t change hands after Austria. With Verstappen and Gasly close behind on 12 and 11, the margins in this ranking are tight.
By Elena Marsh
Liam Lawson didn’t need a headline-grabbing charge at the Red Bull Ring to shape the “Points from outside the top 10” table — but he did reinforce his position at the top. After the Austrian Grand Prix, Lawson remains the category leader on 14, and the lead is still intact despite the ranking itself showing no change at the front.
The key detail in Spielberg was that Lawson again converted a lower-grid Sunday into something tangible: he finished ninth from ninth on the grid to score 2 points, even though his race is listed as “Lapped” over 70 laps. In a ranking defined by what you can salvage when you don’t start in the top 10, that kind of clean points-taking matters: it’s not about dramatic swings every week, it’s about repeatedly cashing in when the opportunity appears.
The pressure is obvious from the numbers behind him. Max Verstappen sits second on 12 and Pierre Gasly third on 11, keeping the top three compressed after eight races. With no reshuffle in the top three in Austria, the story becomes the shape of the season: Lawson’s advantage isn’t huge, but it is being defended — and in this particular metric, a couple of points at a time can be the difference between controlling the narrative and being caught.
Lawson’s lead holds at 14 after eight races, but it remains a narrow buffer over Verstappen on 12 and Gasly on 11 — the kind of gaps that can swing with a single points-scoring recovery from a non-top-10 start.