Even with a brutal Budapest Sunday from the back, Sergio Pérez remains the benchmark for grid-to-finish progress on average. The only ranking movement was a small but telling swap between Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris in the midfield of the table.
By Nadia Okafor
Sergio Pérez continues to lead the 2026 Best average positions gained ranking after round 11, holding a +3.67 average despite a rough Hungarian Grand Prix outcome on paper: he started 22nd and was classified 21st with a retirement after 48 laps. On a metric built around official grid slot minus final classification in classified races, that Budapest result is the kind that can erode an advantage — yet the headline is that it still hasn’t shifted the top of the table.
That stability matters because this ranking rewards repeatable recovery, not one-off heroics. Pérez’s lead over Liam Lawson (+3.40) and Esteban Ocon (+3.25) remains intact, and with the top three unchanged after 11 races, the early-season pattern is holding: the best movers are separating themselves through sustained net progress rather than one standout Sunday.
Very little — and that’s the point. The maximum movement magnitude was just 1 place, and the only visible shuffle was internal to McLaren: Oscar Piastri rose from 12th to 11th on +1.43, while Lando Norris slipped from 11th to 12th on +1.38. No one entered or exited the top 10, and the top three didn’t budge, so the Hungarian Grand Prix functioned more as a consolidation round than a reset.
That micro-swing between Piastri and Norris underlines how tight the mid-table battle is in a ranking measured in tenths of a position per race. The gap between them is just 0.05 on average, which is small enough that a single clean gain-or-loss weekend can flip their order — exactly what happened here, even though neither driver produced the kind of big forward surge this metric celebrates.
Norris’s Budapest result was perfect in conventional terms: pole (grid 1) converted into victory (position 1) over 70 laps, for 25 points. But in a grid-versus-finish movement metric, that excellence is neutral — 1st to 1st yields no positions gained at all — which helps explain how he can win the race yet still be vulnerable to being edged in this particular ranking.
Piastri’s Sunday went the other way. He started 3rd but was classified 20th with a retirement after 55 laps, a huge negative swing on a single-race basis. Yet because this is an average over counted races — and only classified races with a proper grid slot count — the season story can still leave room for him to inch ahead of his team-mate overall, as the +1.43 versus +1.38 figures show. The contrast is the ranking’s central tension: race results and points can move in one direction while grid-to-finish progress trends somewhere else entirely.
With 11 races completed and no change at the top, the ranking is starting to read less like a weekly hot-take and more like a genuine measure of season-long DNA. Pérez’s +3.67, Lawson’s +3.40 and Ocon’s +3.25 are clustered, but they form a clear band above the rest — and Hungary didn’t disrupt that structure.
For the chasers, the message is that progress now comes in small increments. Piastri’s move to 11th and Norris’s drop to 12th is the only evidence of change, and it arrived without any new faces breaking into the top 10. If this “streak” of minimal churn continues, the next meaningful storyline won’t be who has one good Sunday, but who can string together several races of net forward movement from their grid slots.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oscar Piastri | McLaren | 12 | 11 | +1 | +1.43 |
| Lando Norris | McLaren | 11 | 12 | -1 | +1.38 |
Pérez’s +3.67 remains the reference point for sustained recovery across the season, with Lawson (+3.40) and Ocon (+3.25) still within reach if the next few rounds swing their averages. The more immediate battle is lower down: Piastri and Norris are separated by just 0.05 in average positions gained, so the next classified race where either driver finishes meaningfully ahead of their grid slot could flip them again.