Round 9 at Silverstone reshuffled the chasers in the ‘Most positions gained’ ranking: Franco Colapinto surged into the top 10, while pole-sitter Andrea Kimi Antonelli suffered a major hit.
By Camille Fontaine
Max Verstappen remains the 2026 leader in ‘Most positions gained’ after the British Grand Prix, holding P1 on +21 even though Silverstone itself was a net loss: he started 7th and retired in 20th after 46 laps. That contrast is the story of his season in this metric so far — enough big recoveries across the first nine races to stay on top, but not so much margin that a bad Sunday can’t bring the pack into play.
That pack is now tightly stacked behind him. Liam Lawson sits just one place back in the arithmetic at +20, while Esteban Ocon holds third on +14. Verstappen’s lead didn’t change at the top, but the message from Silverstone is that the ranking is becoming less about a runaway and more about who can keep banking steady net gains when their weekends start off on the back foot.
Franco Colapinto produced the biggest swing in the ranking’s top movers: an 11-place jump from 18th to 7th overall. The race numbers explain why he rose so sharply — he started 19th and finished 9th, a +10 recovery that also brought 2 points and a full 52-lap finish at Silverstone. In a cumulative season metric, a double-digit climb in a single weekend is the kind of score that can rewrite the mid-table in one hit.
Colapinto’s move also matters because it wasn’t just a small nudge up the order; it pushed him directly into the top 10 of the season-long ranking. When the gaps are this compact — with Lawson at +20 and Ocon at +14 ahead — the drivers hovering around +10 to +12 are close enough that one more punchy comeback can create a new tier of challengers.
Two names were the clearest winners in top-10 access after Silverstone: Sergio Pérez and Colapinto. Pérez climbed five places in the standings from 11th to 6th on +11, while Colapinto’s leap carried him from 18th to 7th on +10. Those are not cosmetic improvements; they change the weekly conversation from ‘promising recoveries’ to ‘top-10 season movers’ — exactly the currency this ranking tracks.
The flip side was felt by the drivers who exited the top 10: Oliver Bearman and Carlos Sainz. Sainz’s drop is also visible in his season tally and position: he slid four places from 10th to 14th, now sitting on +5. Even without detailing every intervening result, the effect is clear — the midfield of this ranking is volatile, and one poor net-change weekend can undo several smaller gains.
Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s Silverstone numbers read like a warning label for a grid-to-flag ranking. He started from pole (grid 1) and finished 15th, a 14-place loss on the day with 0 points across 52 laps. In the season table that translated into one of the biggest slides anywhere: down seven positions from 14th to 21st overall, with his cumulative figure now at -12.
That matters beyond a single bad result because this metric doesn’t care how fast you are at the front if the final classification doesn’t match the start. A big negative swing forces a longer rebuild than a driver starting deep and finishing just inside the points, and it widens the contrast to the drivers trending upward: Pérez is now +11, Colapinto +10, and even Pierre Gasly has edged up to 4th on +12 after rising three places from 7th.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Franco Colapinto | Alpine F1 Team | 18 | 7 | +11 | +10 |
| Andrea Kimi Antonelli | Mercedes | 14 | 21 | -7 | -12 |
| Sergio Pérez | Cadillac F1 Team | 11 | 6 | +5 | +11 |
Verstappen’s +21 still sets the bar in ‘Most positions gained’, but with Lawson only one back on +20 and a compressed chase group forming, the ranking is now vulnerable to weekends like Silverstone that swing heavily negative. Colapinto’s jump to 7th and Pérez’s rise to 6th underline how quickly the top 10 can change, while Antonelli’s slide to -12 shows the size of deficit a single grid-to-finish collapse can create.