Is Lewis Hamilton being the biggest gainer in F1’s sprint races misleading?

With the final sprint race of the year coming up this weekend, and six more sprint races coming along in 2023 alone, Here at GPBlog we’re going to look back at who’s been the biggest winners, losers and the most consistent across the first five sprint races.

Winners:

Lewis Hamilton has gained the most positions across all the sprint races with a total gain of 11 positons. Although this largely comes down to the Brazil sprint race where the Brit gained 15 places alone the greatest individual performance in a sprint race thus far. Without that the seven-time world champion would be at a net of -4 and has lost positons in 3 out of the 5 sprint races.

Second to Hamilton is quite surprising, in Lance Stroll who has gained eight positions total across the five sprint races, but perhaps most impressively never come out of a sprint race having lost a position, the only other driver to manage that feat is Valtteri Bottas, but the Finn has only gained a total of four positons.

Throughout the sprint races so far World Champion Max Verstappen has only had the opportunity to improve his starting positon three times, and out of those three times he improved his starting position twice, from second the first at Silverstone in 2021, then third to second at Monza in the same year. So while his net improvement of plus one isn’t that impressive on the surface, it just shows the consistency he’s had.

Losers:

There are only to driver to have a net loss of positions in both 2021 and 2022. Pierre Gasly and Mick Schumacher. 

Gasly by far is our biggest loser, losing 23 positions across the 5 sprint races, while the second most is Fernando Alonso at -13, however the Spaniard finished 2021 with three net positions gained over the sprint races, but has lost 16 so far in 2022, which says a lot about his luck this season. 

Meanwhile Gasly has been poor across both seasons, never managing to gain a place in any sprint race so far, and only maintained his position twice across the five races, so while in similarity to that of Hamilton in losing postions in three out of five races. He doesn’t have the highs of Brazil to counteract it, and has also lost far more positions.

Consistent:

Zhou Guanyu and Nicholas Latifi are the only two driver have neutral records in sprints. Zhou obviously has only been in the 2022 Sprints, where he lost 6 places in Imola but gained 6 in Austria. While Latifi gained two across 2021, but has since lost two positions in 2022, where he started in P18 and finished P19 in both.

Lando Norris, Carlos Sainz, Esteban Ocon, Daniel Ricciardo, Antonio Giovinazzi, Nikita Mazepin, Verstappen, Charles Leclerc, Zhou and Kimi Raikkonen have all only lost positions in one sprint race thus far.

Sergio Perez has had twopolar opposite years, losing a net of 15 positions in 2021, but gaining a total of 12 in 2022. This also makes Perez the biggest gainer in 2022 so far, followed by Sainz (+6) then Stroll and Ricciardo, who have both gained a net total of 4.