Round 11 at the Hungaroring didn’t change the Momentum ranking leader, but it reshaped the chasing pack: George Russell’s steep drop contrasts sharply with Lando Norris’s leap to second.
By Elena Marsh
Charles Leclerc remains the Momentum ranking leader after the Hungarian Grand Prix, holding P1 with a +10.58 score. In a metric designed to capture who is scoring faster right now than earlier in the season, that margin still reads like a driver in a different rhythm to the field — even as the biggest headline movement this week belongs to someone else.
That movement is George Russell’s collapse from fifth to 21st, a 16-place plunge that is also the largest swing of the update. Russell leaves the top 10 entirely, and does so with a −5.75 momentum value: a blunt statement that his most recent three rounds have been significantly less productive than what came before. Against a leader unchanged at the top, the pressure shifts to the midfield of this table, where momentum can evaporate quickly.
The top three did change, and the standout is Lando Norris rising five spots from seventh to second with a +6.96 momentum score. That number doesn’t just pull Norris into Leclerc’s orbit — it creates clear separation to the rest of the immediate pack, especially given that the ranking’s tie-breakers (season points, then alphabetical) are only needed when the momentum values match, and here they don’t.
Isack Hadjar now sits third for Red Bull on +3.42, while Max Verstappen slips from second to fourth despite still being positive at +2.63. That juxtaposition is the point of this ranking: even without a total collapse in scoring rate, a driver can lose ground if others accelerate harder over the latest three rounds.
Liam Lawson is the week’s clearest winner at the sharp end of the table’s cut line, jumping six places from 14th to eighth and becoming the ranking’s sole listed top-10 entrant. His momentum number is only +0.50, but in this part of the order that can be enough: it signals a small uptick in recent points-per-race versus earlier rounds, and it arrives in a week where the alternative story is Russell falling out altogether.
Lawson’s on-track result at Hungary underlines why these small positive shifts matter. Starting 11th and finishing eighth for RB F1 Team, he scored 4 points despite being classified Lapped after 69 laps. That’s not a headline haul in isolation, but it’s exactly the kind of incremental scoring that can turn a negative trend into a positive one when the ranking is anchored to rate-of-scoring changes rather than raw totals.
Beyond Russell, the other major cooldown is Oscar Piastri dropping seven places from 13th to 20th with a −4.79 momentum value for McLaren. The contrast inside the same team is striking: Norris is the second-hottest driver in the ranking at +6.96, while Piastri is deep in the red. In a three-race window metric, that kind of split can swing quickly — but while it persists, it changes the narrative of who is “in form” even when both drivers’ season stories may look different elsewhere.
At the front, Leclerc’s Hungary points keep his trend intact. He started from grid position 2 and finished fourth, completing 70 laps and scoring 12 points. Those are solid numbers that, combined with his +10.58 momentum figure, reinforce a simple reality of this table: the leader doesn’t need a dramatic Sunday to maintain control when his recent scoring pace remains comfortably higher than his earlier-season baseline.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| George Russell | Mercedes | 5 | 21 | -16 | −5.75 |
| Oscar Piastri | McLaren | 13 | 20 | -7 | −4.79 |
| Liam Lawson | RB F1 Team | 14 | 8 | +6 | +0.50 |
Leclerc’s +10.58 keeps the Momentum ranking anchored at the top, but the chase has shifted: Norris’s jump to +6.96 makes him the clearest current challenger on form, while Russell (−5.75) and Piastri (−4.79) need a reversal in their next three-round scoring rate just to stop the slide in a ranking built to punish sustained dips.