After Spa’s Belgian Grand Prix, the top of the ‘Most positions gained on lap one’ table is unchanged — yet tighter than it looks, with Carlos Sainz and Fernando Alonso both on +29. Behind them, the churn is in the chasing pack, where Liam Lawson breaks into the top 10 and Pierre Gasly drops out.
By Julian Reyes
Carlos Sainz remains the leader of 2026’s Most positions gained on lap one ranking after round 10 at Spa-Francorchamps, still sitting at +29 for Williams. That headline is deceptively calm: Fernando Alonso is also on +29 for Aston Martin, meaning the top of this metric is effectively a dead heat even though the order hasn’t changed.
The significance of Spa is less about a takeover and more about consolidation. With the leader unchanged and the top three unmoved, the story becomes how hard it is for anyone behind to generate a swing large enough to dislodge the front two when the gaps are now defined by single opening-lap decisions and outcomes. Esteban Ocon stays third on +19 for Haas F1 Team — close enough to keep the podium places in sight, but far enough that matching the leaders requires a sustained run of lap-one progress.
The biggest jump in the table belongs to Isack Hadjar, whose Red Bull campaign gains momentum through movement rather than outright position: he climbs four places in the ranking, from 21st to 17th, even though his season total remains at -10. That contrast is the point of this metric — it rewards opening-lap recovery across a season, and it also exposes how a driver can be improving relative to others while still carrying a net deficit in lap-one progress overall.
Franco Colapinto continues to build the kind of steady profile that matters here. The Alpine driver moves from 10th to 8th with a season tally of +14, edging closer to the sharp end without needing a dramatic leap. And Liam Lawson’s rise is the clearest ‘table’ story: the RB F1 Team driver climbs from 11th to 9th on +12, turning a near-miss into a top-10 position in the ranking as the season reaches 10 races completed.
Hadjar’s Belgian Grand Prix result shows why lap-one movement is more than a footnote when it becomes a season-long pattern. From 21st on the grid he finished 6th, collecting 8 points over 44 laps — a recovery that, by definition, begins with what happens on lap one. Even his qualifying position of 10 underlines the split between where a weekend can start and where it actually begins on Sunday once the lights go out.
Sainz’s own Spa numbers point to a different kind of tension: he started 19th and finished 16th, scoring 0 points in 44 laps. That sort of result doesn’t automatically boost a lap-one gains total, but it does reinforce why his +29 lead matters — it has been built on consistently clawing back ground early, even when the final classification doesn’t flatter the weekend. Meanwhile Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari weekend reads as controlled progress rather than chaos: grid 5 to finish 4th for 12 points, with a qualifying position of 6. In a ranking about opening-lap movement, that kind of small-but-positive Sunday is often the difference between holding station and sliding backward as others collect bigger lap-one swings.
The most visible shift is the one the ranking itself flags: there’s a new top-10 entrant, and Lawson is it. His move to 9th on +12 is important because it’s a line of demarcation — the top 10 in this metric is where season-long lap-one execution starts to look like a reliable calling card rather than an occasional spike.
Pierre Gasly is the counterpoint. He exits the top 10, dropping from 9th to 11th with a total of +10 for Alpine F1 Team. Gasly isn’t suddenly poor on lap one — +10 is still firmly positive — but the table is compressing in that mid-zone, and Spa has shifted the cut line. Hamilton also slips in the ranking, from 8th to 10th on +11, and Valtteri Bottas drops from 12th to 14th on +6 for Cadillac F1 Team, illustrating how quickly a season total can be overtaken when others keep adding incremental gains.
| 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 level on +29, the lead is stable but fragile: one driver stringing together multiple positive lap-one swings could separate the tie. The real pressure point is the top-10 cut line, where Lawson’s arrival and Gasly’s exit show that totals around +10 to +12 can flip positions quickly as the season total accumulates race by race.