After four rounds, Carlos Sainz has become the season’s top lap-one mover, overtaking Fernando Alonso with a +16 total. Miami also reshuffled the chasing pack, with big rank swings despite small margins at the top.
By Diego Torres
The Miami Grand Prix has flipped the lead of the 2026 ‘Most positions gained on lap one’ ranking. Carlos Sainz now sits P1 for Williams on a season total of +16, displacing previous leader Fernando Alonso. It’s a meaningful change because this table rewards repeatable lap-one recovery — grid position minus classified position at the end of lap 1 — rather than a single standout start, and after four completed races the sample is starting to say something about who is consistently moving forward early.
Sainz’s Miami weekend underlined the theme. He started 13th and finished 9th, converting a compromised grid slot into points (2) and, more importantly for this metric, adding to the body of work that has now pushed him ahead overall. Behind him, the fight is tight: Arvid Lindblad (RB F1 Team) and Alonso (Aston Martin) are both on +13, meaning the gap from first to third is only +3 in a ranking built from cumulative, race-by-race increments.
Even with Sainz out front on +16, the shape of the top three suggests this lead is anything but comfortable. Lindblad’s +13 has him second, level with Alonso in third, and the top three itself is unchanged in composition even as the order at the top has shifted. That matters: it hints at a stable set of drivers repeatedly doing the same thing well — gaining ground immediately — rather than a constantly rotating cast.
Because this ranking excludes races without lap-1 timing data on record and requires at least three counted races, it also rewards drivers whose season totals are built on comparable evidence. In that context, Sainz’s move to P1 is as much about consolidation as it is about a single round: after Miami, he has created a small but real buffer to two drivers on identical totals.
The biggest upward steps came from Charles Leclerc and Lance Stroll, each gaining three places in the table. Leclerc jumped from 8th to 5th and sits on +8 for Ferrari; Stroll rose from 10th to 7th on +8 for Aston Martin. Those are meaningful climbs in a cumulative metric because they can quickly place a driver within one strong weekend of the top-five fight, even if the lead remains a few points of movement away.
At the other end, the most dramatic ranking drop belonged to Valtteri Bottas. Despite holding a season total of +6, Bottas slid six spots from 5th to 11th for Cadillac F1 Team and dropped out of the top 10 entirely — one of two top-10 exits alongside Pierre Gasly. The counterintuitive part is the reminder of what this list measures: it’s not total race pace or race result, but the net position swing from the grid to the end of lap 1, accumulated across the season.
Max Verstappen’s movement was the same magnitude as Bottas’s in rank terms — six places — but it came with a very different signal. He fell from 12th to 18th with a season value of -7 for Red Bull, a stark outlier among the named movers because it indicates net ground lost across lap-one classifications rather than gained. In a tight midfield of totals, negative accumulation can quickly drag a driver down the order.
Gasly’s Miami-induced slide was also severe: down five places from 7th to 12th at Alpine F1 Team, even though his season value is still positive at +4. That combination — positive total, but falling rank — is the telltale of a table where other drivers’ recent gains can overtake you quickly. Bottas, Gasly and Verstappen collectively show how fast this metric can swing after only four rounds: a driver can be trending the right way on aggregate and still lose significant ground in the standings if others stack better opening laps.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Valtteri Bottas | Cadillac F1 Team | 5 | 11 | -6 | +6 |
| Max Verstappen | Red Bull | 12 | 18 | -6 | -7 |
| Pierre Gasly | Alpine F1 Team | 7 | 12 | -5 | +4 |
Sainz’s new P1 on +16 gives him a modest cushion over Lindblad and Alonso on +13, but the margin is small enough that one strong lap-one swing can change the lead again. The bigger storyline may be the volatility just behind the top: three- and six-place ranking moves in Miami show how quickly the top 10 can reshuffle after only four rounds.