After the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, the lap-one recovery ranking remains headed by a dead heat: Carlos Sainz and Fernando Alonso both sit on +29. The bigger shift happened just behind, where midfield movers shuffled the top 10 — and Pierre Gasly fell out of it.
By Julian Reyes
The Belgian Grand Prix didn’t break the season-long stalemate at the top of the “Most positions gained on lap one” table. Carlos Sainz (Williams) stays classified P1 in the ranking on +29, but only because the tie-break keeps him ahead of Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin), who is also on +29. With the top three unchanged and no leader change flagged after round 10, the story at the sharp end is less about a swing in the standings and more about how finely balanced the leading pair’s season has become through 10 completed races.
That context matters because this metric is pure lap-one damage limitation and opportunity: it sums grid position minus position at the end of lap 1, race by race, and excludes any event without lap-1 data rather than filling gaps. Through that lens, Spa reinforced a theme rather than rewriting it — Sainz and Alonso are still the benchmark for consistently “clawing back” positions immediately, even as their weekend outcomes can look very different in the final classification. Sainz, for instance, finished 16th at Spa after starting 19th, a reminder that a driver can be elite at early progress across a season even when an individual Sunday ends with no points.
The most dramatic movement belonged to Isack Hadjar (Red Bull), who jumped four places in the ranking — from 21st to 17th — despite still sitting on a season total of -10. That negative number is the key: it means that, across the races where he has usable lap-one data and a proper grid slot, Hadjar has more often lost ground than gained it on the opening lap. Spa helped him “stop the bleeding” in the standings, and he backed it up with a headline Sunday result: he started 21st and finished sixth, scoring 8 points over 44 laps. It’s a strong reminder that end-of-race recovery and lap-one movement are related but not identical stories — and that one huge race result doesn’t instantly erase earlier lap-one deficits when the ranking is cumulative.
Franco Colapinto (Alpine) made a quieter but more directly relevant push in the table, rising two positions from 10th to eighth on +14. In a ranking where the top is fixed on +29, every incremental step matters because the next layer is where the gaps can be closed without needing a season-defining swing. Colapinto’s climb is also significant because it comes with a “top-10 entry/exit” churn elsewhere: Pierre Gasly (also Alpine) dropped out of the top 10 entirely, falling from ninth to 11th on +10.
Spa’s clearest knock-on effect was at the back end of the top 10: Liam Lawson (RB) moved into ninth, up two positions from 11th, with a season sum of +12. In a metric built on repeating small wins, +12 can be the difference between being a regular talking point and being invisible — and Lawson’s move is explicitly marked as a new top-10 entry after round 10.
Gasly’s exit underlines how tight that region is. A swing of a couple of ranking positions separated “top-10 lap-one performer” from “just outside”, even though Gasly still owns a positive season tally (+10). Meanwhile Lewis Hamilton (Ferrari) slid two places in the ranking from eighth to 10th with +11, which captures the theme of congestion: +10, +11 and +12 are clustered closely enough that a single weekend’s lap-one story can reorder the group, even without touching the top-three picture.
Spa offered a neat snapshot of why this ranking is useful but also easy to misread. Hamilton’s race — fourth place from fifth on the grid, 12 points over 44 laps — looks like controlled progress in the classification, yet his lap-one season ranking position actually worsened to 10th. That’s the point: this leaderboard doesn’t care about where you finish on Sunday; it cares about what you did by the end of lap 1 across the season’s counted races.
On the other side, Hadjar’s 21st-to-sixth surge shows how a driver can produce a massive overall comeback while still carrying a season-long lap-one deficit (-10). The ranking is tracking a specific skill: repeated opening-lap net gains from a measured grid slot. With a “streak” signal still active in the dataset and only 10 rounds complete, the pressure for the movers in the +10 to +14 bracket is to keep stacking small positives — because the leaders are already sitting on +29 with no sign, yet, of giving ground.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Isack Hadjar | Red Bull | 21 | 17 | +4 | -10 |
| Franco Colapinto | Alpine F1 Team | 10 | 8 | +2 | +14 |
| Liam Lawson | RB F1 Team | 11 | 9 | +2 | +12 |
With Sainz and Alonso still tied on +29, the lead of the lap-one gains ranking is stable — but the fight just behind is fluid. Colapinto (+14) and Lawson (+12) are positioning themselves to pressure the next layer up, while the fine margins around +10 to +12 have already pushed Gasly out of the top 10 and dropped Hamilton to 10th despite his strong Spa finish.