A late-season knife-edge battle at the top of the lap-one gainers ranking has a new name at the front. Carlos Sainz’s Singapore weekend was enough to dislodge Fernando Alonso on the tie-break, even though both sit on +30.
By Julian Reyes
The Singapore Grand Prix has flipped the lead of the 2026 “Most positions gained on lap one” ranking, with Carlos Sainz now ranked P1 for the season on +30 for Williams. Fernando Alonso, the previous leader, drops to P2 despite holding the exact same headline total of +30 for Aston Martin — a rare case where the standings change without the number itself separating the top two.
That detail matters, because this ranking is built on accumulated opening-lap recoveries: grid position minus classified position at the end of lap 1, summed across the season, with races lacking lap-1 data excluded rather than guessed. After 17 races completed, the picture at the top is unusually tight: Sainz and Alonso are level on +30, with Esteban Ocon only two behind on +28 in P3. With the top three unchanged but the leader changed, Singapore has effectively turned the front of this table into a margin-for-error story rather than a runaway.
At first glance, Sainz’s Singapore result looks like the wrong shape for a lap-one gains headline: he started 13th and finished 14th, classified Lapped after 61 laps. But this ranking isn’t about race finish heroics or Sunday points — it’s specifically about what happens by the end of lap 1, and the season-long total that comes from repeatedly improving (or failing to) position immediately after the lights.
The consequence is that a driver can move the needle in this table even on a day that ends with zero points, and Sainz’s rise from P2 to P1 shows just how sensitive the summit is right now. With Alonso no longer leading outright, Sainz has effectively converted a season defined by early-lap progress into the top ranking slot, even though the separation is fine enough that it currently needs tie-breakers to be resolved.
Franco Colapinto is the quiet climber in the background. The Alpine driver gained a place in the overall ranking, moving from P6 to P5 with a season total of +22. That doesn’t put him in the Sainz/Alonso/Ocon fight yet, but it does underline how the mid-table can still be reshaped late in the year when multiple drivers are separated by single-race swings in lap-one position change.
Sergio Pérez is another to inch forward, up from P7 to P6 on +19 for Cadillac F1 Team. It’s the kind of incremental movement that often gets overlooked next to the headline battle at +30, yet it’s exactly what this metric rewards: banking small, repeatable gains across many rounds instead of relying on a single outlier start.
The steepest fall belongs to Arvid Lindblad, who drops three positions in the ranking from P5 to P8 despite still showing a positive season figure of +17 for RB F1 Team. Singapore captured how quickly this table can punish a weekend that goes the wrong way early: Lindblad started ninth and was classified 15th, Lapped after 61 laps, scoring 0 points.
Even without detailing his lap-one classified position in Singapore, the broader message is clear: this ranking is a measure of opening-lap damage limitation as much as it is opportunism. Falling from a top-five ranking slot to eighth in one round is a reminder that positive season totals aren’t a guarantee of stability — not when the top of the table is tied and the field behind is close enough for a single weekend to reorder multiple names.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arvid Lindblad | RB F1 Team | 5 | 8 | -3 | +17 |
| Carlos Sainz | Williams | 2 | 1 | +1 | +30 |
| Franco Colapinto | Alpine F1 Team | 6 | 5 | +1 | +22 |
With Sainz and Alonso tied on +30 and Ocon only two back on +28, the lap-one gains ranking is now a high-sensitivity fight: small opening-lap swings can decide the lead without any driver needing a headline-grabbing Sunday result.