The Momentum ranking tracks who is accelerating or cooling off by comparing the last three races’ points-per-race to the earlier-season average. After Singapore, Max Verstappen remains far clear, while the biggest shake-up is Nico Hülkenberg’s jump into the top 10 and Franco Colapinto’s sharp drop out of it.
By Camille Fontaine
Max Verstappen remains the benchmark in this Momentum ranking, and by a margin that makes the rest of the table look like a separate contest. His value sits at +13.17 after 17 rounds, meaning his points-per-race over the most recent three races is dramatically higher than his average across the earlier part of the season. With the leader unchanged and the top three unchanged too, the headline isn’t a late-season coup at the front — it’s how hard it is for anyone else to even begin to cut into that gap.
Singapore underlined the same story on track as well: Verstappen converted pole into victory, banking 25 points from P1 on the grid to P1 at the finish over 62 laps. Momentum ranking doesn’t measure Sundays in isolation, but a weekend like that slots neatly into why his recent scoring rate continues to tower above his own season baseline.
The immediate chase group is stable, but not static. Charles Leclerc holds second with a +4.07 momentum figure and Isack Hadjar remains third on +2.21, leaving a clear step down from Verstappen’s +13.17 while still separating themselves from the midfield of this metric. That matters because Momentum ranking is designed to find changes in scoring speed, and right now it shows a defined top tier even without reshuffling the podium positions in the table.
Hadjar’s presence in that top three also serves as a reminder that momentum doesn’t require perfection every weekend; it requires a recent run that outpaces what came before. Singapore’s race-wide ‘biggest mover’ tag went to Hadjar with a gain of 12 positions, a single-race data point that fits the broader idea of a driver currently trending upwards in outcomes compared to earlier rounds — without needing this ranking to claim it will keep happening.
Nico Hülkenberg’s climb is the cleanest structural change near the sharp end of the Momentum table. He rockets from 13th to 6th — a seven-place gain — and crucially that move carries him into the top 10 entrants list after Singapore. His momentum value is +0.83, a modest-looking number next to Verstappen’s, but significant because it crosses the line into positive territory: Hülkenberg is scoring faster across the last three races than he did in the season’s earlier baseline.
His Singapore result helps illustrate how those increments accumulate. Starting 10th, finishing 8th, and taking 4 points, Hülkenberg delivered a points-paying weekend that supports an upward recent average. In a ranking that only appears once enough races exist for a ‘recent three’ versus ‘earlier season’ comparison, a steady points return can be enough to surge relative to drivers whose recent average has slipped.
Franco Colapinto’s movement is the stark counterweight to Hülkenberg’s rise. He drops 10 places from 8th to 18th — the biggest swing in the key movers list — and he is the sole top-10 exit named after Singapore. His momentum value is −1.93, signalling that over the most recent three races his points-per-race rate has fallen behind what he averaged earlier in the season.
Singapore itself was a zero, and the details show why it bites in a metric built on short windows: Colapinto retired after 29 laps, classified as ‘R’, and scored 0 points after starting 15th (16th in qualifying). A negative momentum figure doesn’t diagnose the reason, but it does quantify the consequence: his recent scoring speed has cooled enough to knock him from the top 10 of this form table.
Elsewhere, the ranking also shows how volatile ‘direction of travel’ can be without necessarily becoming positive. Lewis Hamilton gains five positions from 22nd to 17th, yet his momentum remains negative at −1.88. In other words, he has improved relative to other drivers’ recent-vs-earlier swing, but he is still scoring slower in the last three races than he did previously — a subtle but important distinction when reading this table as an indicator of who is truly accelerating.
| Driver | Team | Before | After | Δ | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Franco Colapinto | Alpine F1 Team | 8 | 18 | -10 | −1.93 |
| Nico Hülkenberg | Audi | 13 | 6 | +7 | +0.83 |
| Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 22 | 17 | +5 | −1.88 |
With Verstappen entrenched on +13.17 and the top three unchanged, the Momentum ranking is now more about who can establish a sustained ‘recent-race’ upswing behind him — and Singapore’s clearest signal was Hülkenberg converting a small positive (+0.83) into a major positional gain, while Colapinto’s −1.93 slump shows how quickly a short run can drag a driver out of the top 10.