The Dutch Grand Prix reshuffled the season-long grid-to-flag losses table, with George Russell edging ahead of team-mate Andrea Kimi Antonelli at the top. Pierre Gasly’s Zandvoort climb, meanwhile, dragged him into the top 10 of the metric and pushed Carlos Sainz out.
By Camille Fontaine
George Russell is the new leader of 2026’s ‘Most positions lost’ ranking after round 12 at Circuit Park Zandvoort, moving from second to first with a season total of −8 net places. That swap matters because this table isn’t about points or podiums; it’s a running tally of how much ground a driver has surrendered from their starting slot across every classified race they began from the grid, and the margins at the top are now tight enough that a single weekend can flip it.
Russell’s lead change comes at Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s expense: the previous leader drops to second on −7. Zandvoort itself underlined how close their season-long profiles are. Antonelli started third and finished second, a net gain in that race, while Russell went the other way: he started second and finished third, a net loss. When the season’s cumulative arithmetic is this compressed, even a one-place slide in a single grand prix can become a table-turner.
Charles Leclerc remains third on −3, which puts a clear buffer between the lead duo and the rest of the top three. That separation is important context for the next phase of the season: Russell and Antonelli are fighting a head-to-head within the same team at the very top of a metric designed to expose weekends where qualifying promise wasn’t converted into finishing position.
The ranking’s lens is brutally simple: where you started versus where you finished, summed across the year. So Zandvoort’s key result for the lead battle isn’t just that Russell finished third and Antonelli second, but the direction of movement relative to their grid positions: Russell lost one place (2nd to 3rd), Antonelli gained one (3rd to 2nd). That’s the kind of small delta that can still carry season-level consequences when the gap between first and second in the standings is just one net place (−8 versus −7).
As a single piece of race-day color that reinforces why this ranking can move quickly: the Dutch Grand Prix had six retirements among the classified context of the race weekend, meaning the finishing order was shaped by attrition as well as pace. And in a field where the biggest grid-to-flag gainer was Fernando Alonso with +9, it’s a reminder that Zandvoort was a round capable of producing pronounced positional swings — even if the story at the very top of this particular ranking turned on just a single place either way.
Pierre Gasly produced the most dramatic change in the ranking itself, jumping five places from 14th to 9th on a season figure of +7 for Alpine F1 Team. His Dutch Grand Prix was a small but telling example of how this metric can reward recovery: Gasly started 11th and finished 10th, picking up one spot and scoring 1 point despite being classified as lapped. That kind of incremental progress doesn’t win headlines on Sunday night, but over 12 races it can materially reshape where a driver sits in a season-long movement table.
Gabriel Bortoleto’s step is subtler but still meaningful: he climbs from 7th to 6th, sitting on +4 for Audi. Around the fringes of the top 10, these one-position shifts are often the difference between being part of the conversation and being invisible in the weekly snapshots — especially when the site’s methodology excludes pit-lane starts and therefore concentrates on what happens when drivers begin from a ‘proper’ grid slot.
There were losers as well, and not only at the very top. Arvid Lindblad drops from 6th to 7th on +5, while Lewis Hamilton slips from 9th to 10th on +8, illustrating how congested the mid-table remains. The top-10 cut line also moved: Gasly’s entry coincided with Carlos Sainz exiting, a reminder that even when the headline is Russell versus Antonelli, there’s a quieter battle for relevance just below.
The immediate point to track is how little separates first from second: Russell’s −8 versus Antonelli’s −7. With Leclerc back on −3, the top three is stable in membership but not in order at the front, and Zandvoort showed that a one-place swing in either direction can be decisive in a cumulative table.
Further down, Gasly’s move into ninth and Hamilton’s slide to 10th hint at a volatile edge to the top 10, where a single weekend of gaining or shedding places can reshuffle several positions at once. With 12 races completed, the ranking is now deep enough that sustained patterns matter — but close enough that another Zandvoort-sized nudge can rewrite the story again.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pierre Gasly | Alpine F1 Team | 14 | 9 | +5 | +7 |
| George Russell | Mercedes | 2 | 1 | +1 | −8 |
| Gabriel Bortoleto | Audi | 7 | 6 | +1 | +4 |
Russell’s switch to P1 on −8 over Antonelli’s −7 turns the ‘Most positions lost’ lead into a one-place knife-edge, where even a single grid-to-finish swing can flip the order again. Behind them, Gasly’s jump into ninth and Sainz’s exit underline how unstable the top-10 threshold is becoming as the season reaches 12 completed races.