Round 16 at Sepang kept Max Verstappen in control of the Power ranking on 75.9, but the weekend produced the sharpest reshuffle lower down: Pierre Gasly dropped seven places to 18th as Franco Colapinto surged six.
By Elena Marsh
Max Verstappen remains the Power ranking leader after round 16 at Sepang, and the numbers underline how stable the very top has been: 75.9 keeps him P1 with no change of leader flagged. That steadiness matters in a ranking built from official qualifying and race results rather than lap-time or strategy data, because it rewards repeatable outcomes across team-mate head-to-heads, grid-to-finish progress, and finish reliability rather than one-off peaks.
Behind him, the picture is a little more fluid. Liam Lawson holds second on 62.7 and Sergio Pérez is third on 61.9, with the top three changing even though the leader did not. That combination — a fixed reference point at the front and movement just behind — is what makes this round feel more like a consolidation phase for Verstappen than a runaway: the chasing order is still capable of shuffling week to week even if the benchmark stays put.
Pierre Gasly’s drop is the defining swing of this update. He fell from 11th to 18th — the biggest movement magnitude of the round — and his composite score now sits at 36.3 for Alpine. The raw Sepang result that stands out in the available inputs is the contrast between starting and finishing position: he qualified and started 9th but was classified 16th over 55 laps, a negative grid-to-finish delta that directly weighs on a model where positions gained carries 30% of the score.
The more awkward context for Gasly is that the ranking is also heavily shaped by team-mate comparison (40%). When you combine a weekend with lost track position against your own grid slot with the season-long pressure of intra-team head-to-heads, the score can swing fast — and a seven-place fall shows how quickly a mid-pack profile can be reclassified from top-10 contention to the lower midfield on this metric.
Franco Colapinto produced the round’s biggest upward move among the key shapers of the table, jumping from 19th to 13th for Alpine with a 44.9 score. His Sepang data points align neatly with what this Power ranking values: he took 13th after starting 21st, a gain of eight positions that feeds the positions-gained component while also counting as a classified finish.
There’s also a wider Alpine subplot in the week’s movement. With Gasly sliding to 18th while Colapinto climbs to 13th, the same team has supplied both the biggest fall and one of the biggest rises in a single update. Because team-mate head-to-head is the largest slice of the composite, any continued divergence between the two will keep Alpine’s internal ordering as one of the most consequential storylines for how both drivers’ scores evolve.
The top-10 boundary line is still volatile. Isack Hadjar is this week’s new entrant at 10th on 49.0 for Red Bull, while Esteban Ocon is the listed top-10 exit. That matters because the Power ranking is not a points table: the final few places inside the top 10 often hinge on marginal differences across the four components — especially when qualifying position is only 10% but can still separate closely matched profiles.
Arvid Lindblad’s rise from 9th to 5th is the other standout jump near the front, up four positions to a 59.9 score for RB F1 Team. As a small piece of race-day color that also fits the model’s emphasis, Lindblad was the biggest grid-to-finish mover in the whole field at Sepang, gaining 12 places — exactly the kind of swing that can meaningfully lift a composite where positions gained is nearly a third of the total. Meanwhile, Lando Norris’s slip from 5th to 8th (54.0) and Gabriel Bortoleto’s drop to 19th on 32.3 show how quickly the mid-top tier can compress and reshuffle even when the No.1 slot does not.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pierre Gasly | Alpine F1 Team | 11 | 18 | -7 | 36.3 |
| Franco Colapinto | Alpine F1 Team | 19 | 13 | +6 | 44.9 |
| Gabriel Bortoleto | Audi | 14 | 19 | -5 | 32.3 |
Verstappen’s 75.9 keeps the Power ranking’s benchmark unchanged after 16 races, but the churn behind him is intensifying: Lawson (62.7) and Pérez (61.9) remain within touching distance of each other, while the top-10 cut line shifts again with Hadjar in and Ocon out. The biggest implication from Sepang is how quickly internal team narratives can redefine scores — Alpine alone produced a seven-place fall (Gasly to 18th) and a six-place rise (Colapinto to 13th) — and those head-to-head-driven swings can reshape the midfield order without the leader needing to move at all.