Piastri 'pretty mind-blown' by overturned penalty

McLaren’s Oscar Piastri said he was “pretty mind-blown” about the decision to overturn Pierre Gasly’s penalty for pit-lane speeding in the Monaco Grand Prix.

Gasly was returned to third place in the race after initially being dropped to seventh following a successful appeal by his Alpine team.

But the stewards’ verdict revealed an error with measuring the pit-lane speed limit. This affected a number of other drivers, who were also penalised.

“I’m pretty mind-blown by the decision,” Piastri said, “because how you can reverse a decision that was ultimately wrong, but when other people have been penalised for the same thing and served a penalty in the race, how you can then change one penalty, knowing that probably five or six other races have been impacted by that, is astonishing.”

What happened and how?

Gasly and Piastri were two of five drivers penalised for breaking the pit-lane speed limit. The others were Mercedes’ George Russell, Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton and Gasly’s team-mate Franco Colapinto.

All but one of the penalties was for going 0.1km/h over the speed limit; one of Gasly’s was for a 0.4km/h transgression.

Russell ended up being demoted to 12th place from third after picking up a drive-through penalty, a punishment for not correctly serving his speeding punishment at a pit stop. That cost him 15 points in his title fight with team-mate Kimi Antonelli, who won the race.

The Briton urged stewards during a red-flag period not to impose the drive-through and deal with it after the race because there was obviously something odd going on, but his pleas fell on deaf ears.

Ferrari managed to avoid Hamilton suffering for his penalty as it was served during a safety-car period. Piastri lost at least one place – to Gasly – when he served his. Colapinto was in any case out of the points.

The stewards’ verdict in Alpine’s ‘right of review’ case into Gasly’s penalty acknowledged that the pit lane had been measured as being longer than it was possible to drive it.

As the limit is measured by the time it takes for drivers to travel a certain distance, it incorrectly calculated drivers as speeding when in fact none had exceeded the 60km/h limit.

The report also said that after the third penalty was awarded in the race, the stewards asked officials whether something unusual was going on, and were told nothing was.

This was despite the issue having been raised with governing body the FIA during the weekend by teams.

The decision to expunge Gasly’s penalty demoted Red Bull’s Isack Hadjar from the podium, and Piastri from fourth to fifth.

What are people saying?

Mercedes, Red Bull and McLaren have all given notice of an intention to appeal against the Gasly decision.

Piastri added: “I’ve obviously lost a position, but you can only imagine how George is feeling – so I could not believe my eyes.

“Yes, I lost the position to Pierre because I served the penalty, so technically I should be P3. But then, technically George should be P3, and the whole thing is now a mess.

“[It’s] quite the predicament they’ve got themselves into, and I don’t know how you get yourself out of that one, because now the precedent is ‘you don’t serve the penalty, you take it to court, you wait probably a few months to decide the race’, and who the hell wants to go racing like that?

“‘Perplexed’ is the word I would use.

“Before you could kind of say: ‘Bad luck, it was wrong, but it was wrong for everybody, and everyone was treated the same.’

“Now it’s very much how you judge that. I don’t think the race result will be cancelled, but yes, it’s quite the situation that’s unfolded.”

Gasly said: “What I’m going to say is that it should not be right to penalise me for something that we haven’t done just because others got penalised.

“If a potential mistake was done one time, two times, three times, it’s not a reason to do it a fourth time. So I think just to draw the line here.”

An F1 statement said: “We measured the relevant areas in the pit lane identically to the 2025 event and followed procedures in the usual way.

“However, the process has identified a measurement discrepancy. Like everyone in the sport we strive for the best results and, as always, any improvements or refinements that are identified as being required in light of this situation will be implemented.”

What’s going to happen next?

Mercedes F1 boss Toto Wolff said the team had consulted lawyers about their situation and they are in conversations with the FIA on the matter.

Wolff said: “We were on the phone with our lawyers to look at what can we do for George. A drive-through, if it didn’t happen at the end, is equivalent of 20 seconds’ race time. What would 20 seconds race time have meant for his result?

“Do we think that we realistically have a position, a chance of reverting the result? I don’t think so, but we definitely have to give it a go if we see that there is a millimetre of chance to do so and bring him back to whatever it was before.”

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said it was “a very complex case and we do feel we should consider appealing”.

The situation raises the possibility that Russell could lose the championship as a consequence of an error by race officials.

But there is already precedent for that happening.

In Abu Dhabi in 2021, race director Michael Masi incorrectly applied the rules during a safety-car period at the end of the race, and his actions led directly to Lewis Hamilton being overtaken on the last lap by Max Verstappen, and the championship passing from the Briton to the Dutchman.

At that time, Mercedes challenged the decision but their protest was rejected.

There were questions about how the FIA conducted that scenario on that day, especially as it was later admitted that Masi had committed a “human error” and was sacked.

But stewards realised there was nothing within the rules that they could do to alter the result.

In this case, there seems to have been a series of failures of communication within the FIA and between the FIA and the official timekeepers provided by commercial rights holder F1.

Teams raised the issue of the pit-lane speed limit during the weekend and their comments were ignored.

Those conversations were, it seems, not passed to the stewards, nor to the timekeepers.

And extraordinarily, when stewards asked the race director during the race whether there were any concerns about the measurement of the pit-lane limit, they were told there were not, even though there were some in the FIA who were aware of concerns there might be.

The situation also raises issues about how teams react to in-race penalties in the future. Many – such as pit-lane speed limits – cannot be appealed against by regulation. Will teams now ignore them all to fight after a race?