After 12 races, Max Verstappen’s season-long recovery score remains the benchmark at +22 in the ‘Most positions gained’ table. The Dutch GP shifted the chasing pack: Liam Lawson moved up to second while Lewis Hamilton clawed his way into the top 10.
By Elena Marsh
Max Verstappen still tops the 2026 ‘Most positions gained’ ranking after the Dutch Grand Prix, holding station on +22. That’s a notable kind of stability given his Zandvoort result was a retirement after qualifying 7th and lining up 7th on the grid.
The key point for this table is that it measures season-long net movement from grid position to classified finishing position, race by race, then sums those swings. Verstappen’s lead did not change hands at Zandvoort, and the top three did not reshuffle as a group — but the pressure behind him tightened anyway, because the battle for second and third is now defined by single-digit margins.
The biggest shift at the sharp end of the ranking came from inside Red Bull’s own trio of table-setters. Liam Lawson climbed from 3rd to 2nd overall, taking his season total to +19, while Isack Hadjar slipped from 2nd to 3rd on +18. In other words, second place changed hands on a one-position difference in the cumulative numbers.
That matters because it reframes what the ‘chase’ looks like. Verstappen’s +22 still gives him breathing room, but the gap to Lawson is now just +3, and Hadjar is only +1 behind Lawson. In a metric that can swing by multiple places on a single Sunday — especially in a race where classification is hard-earned — the order behind the leader is becoming as interesting as the leader itself.
Pierre Gasly’s slide was the headline mover in positional terms: down seven spots in the standings from 6th to 13th overall, even though his season figure remains positive at +7 for Alpine F1 Team. Zandvoort itself captured the fine margins: Gasly started 11th and finished 10th (classified, lapped) for a one-place gain and a single point — but in a tightly packed mid-table on this metric, that wasn’t enough to defend his top-10 foothold.
At the other end of the swing, Lewis Hamilton produced the kind of incremental recovery that this ranking rewards across a season. Starting 5th and finishing 4th at Zandvoort, he banked another one-place gain to lift his season total to +8 and jump from 13th to 10th overall for Ferrari. That move came at a direct cost to the top 10’s previous occupant: Gasly is the name listed as the week’s top-10 exit.
Zandvoort offered a useful reminder that this is not a ‘best single comeback’ award but a cumulative measure of how often a driver has improved their starting position across the year. One Sunday can be quiet — Hamilton’s +1 from 5th to 4th is modest in isolation — yet still have meaningful standings consequences when it nudges a driver into the top 10 and shuffles others out.
The race also underlined how volatile classified outcomes can be in context: there were six retirements in the Dutch Grand Prix, and the field’s biggest single mover gained nine places. Without over-reading one result, that backdrop helps explain why the Lawson-Hadjar fight is so live: when the weekend-to-weekend environment can generate large position swings, a one-point gap (+19 vs +18) is a fragile separator.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pierre Gasly | Alpine F1 Team | 6 | 13 | -7 | +7 |
| Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 13 | 10 | +3 | +8 |
| Liam Lawson | Red Bull | 3 | 2 | +1 | +19 |
Verstappen’s +22 cushion remains intact, but the story is sharpening behind him: Lawson’s rise to +19 trims the gap to +3, while Hadjar’s +18 keeps second place under immediate threat. In the mid-pack, Hamilton reaching 10th on +8 shows how even a one-place gain (5th to 4th) can flip the top-10 boundary — and Gasly’s fall from 6th to 13th is a warning about how quickly that line can move.