Oscar Piastri’s rise from sixth to fourth was the biggest positional change in the championship ranking after the Austrian Grand Prix. Up front, Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s 15-point haul for third kept him comfortably clear on 171 points.
By Nadia Okafor
The sharpest swing in the championship ranking after round eight in Spielberg came from Oscar Piastri, who climbed two places from sixth to fourth on 80 points. A fourth place from seventh on the grid, worth 12 points over 71 laps, didn’t just add to his total – it moved him into the thick of the next battle behind the top three, in a weekend where the maximum movement anywhere in the standings was only two places.
At the front, the bigger story was stability rather than upheaval. Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s third place for Mercedes brought 15 points and took him to 171, maintaining a 40-point cushion over team-mate George Russell, now second on 131. The lead did not change hands and the top three remained the same names, but Russell’s one-place rise from third to second shows how quickly the internal Mercedes picture can shift even when the championship leader is still being protected by a sizeable margin.
Ferrari’s side of that top-three fight tightened in the opposite direction. Lewis Hamilton slipped from second to third despite standing on 125 points, while Charles Leclerc absorbed the weekend’s most damaging drop among the key movers: from fourth to sixth, leaving him on 79 after scoring just 4 points for eighth from second on the grid. With Piastri now on 80, the fight just behind the podium positions has compressed to a single point between McLaren and Ferrari’s Leclerc, setting up a more volatile chasing pack even as Antonelli’s advantage continues.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oscar Piastri | McLaren | 6 | 4 | +2 | 80 |
| Charles Leclerc | Ferrari | 4 | 6 | -2 | 79 |
| George Russell | Mercedes | 3 | 2 | +1 | 131 |
Antonelli leaving Austria still 40 points clear on 171 keeps the title picture anchored at the top, but Russell’s move to second and Piastri edging ahead of Leclerc by 80 to 79 underlines how quickly the order behind can reshuffle with small point swings.