A week on from the Monaco Grand Prix, the result is still moving. FIA stewards used the Barcelona race weekend to wipe out the two five-second penalties that had demoted Pierre Gasly from third to seventh — and within hours, McLaren and Red Bull had served notice that they might fight the call.
At the heart of it was a faulty measurement. An unusually high five drivers were docked for pit-lane speeding at Monaco, and when Alpine took Gasly's case to a right of review, the official timekeeper conceded the error. The stewards quoted Formula One Management directly: "FOM, as Official Timekeeping Supplier to the Competition, provided evidence that the distance used in calculating the F1 Official Timing (and hence the pit lane speed) was inaccurate." The culprit, FOM found, was the first timing loop at pit entry, calibrated too short, which made cars look quicker than they actually were.
Gasly was the obvious winner. "It sounds really good," he told Sky. "I must say I'm extremely happy for the whole team, very proud of the way they have fought for all of us for that result." The Frenchman said he had "felt very low" the night of the race, torn between satisfaction at his pace and frustration at losing the trophy. "I'm very proud of F1, the FIA, for the transparency and everybody recognising their responsibilities in that situation," he added. "Today, it's a massive step forward for our sport."
That sentiment is far from universal. Restoring Gasly to the podium pushed Red Bull's Isack Hadjar down to fourth and McLaren's Oscar Piastri to fifth. Both teams filed a notification of intent to appeal inside the one-hour deadline set by Article 15.4 of the International Sporting Code, which hands them another 96 hours to decide whether to go ahead.
Their arguments were aired in the hearing itself. Red Bull sporting director Stephen Knowles maintained the pit-lane timing had been consistent across the weekend and that teams managed their own systems in the knowledge that the calculation was never exact. McLaren's Will Courtenay pushed back against changing the results too, despite the fact that his own driver Piastri had been caught out. Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu offered the bluntest take, observing that most of the 22-car field had got through cleanly, so the responsibility lay with teams to build in a buffer.
Piastri said the trouble had been clear from inside the car. "I think in the race it was reasonably obvious, I thought, that there was something weird going on, because maybe you have one or maybe two cars in the same race to have pit lane speeding penalty, but not seven or eight or however many it was," he said. And, he argued, there was no clean way to rewind it: because he had served his penalty, his own race had changed, "so they can't change the result now."
Mercedes have their own grievance. George Russell collected a pit-lane penalty and then a drive-through for botching the first one, sending him out of the top ten and leaving him 68 points adrift of team-mate Kimi Antonelli in the title race. Toto Wolff said he had been "on the phone with our lawyers to look at what we can do for George," but drew a line at challenging Gasly. "We wouldn't appeal the Gasly result, certainly, but we would like the FIA to look at what could be the remedies for George's race," he said. "Definitely something we have a reason to be annoyed."
FOM has promised to overhaul how it measures Monaco's quirky pit lane. Until the appeal clock runs down, though, the order of a race that finished last Sunday is anyone's guess.
