Pierre Gasly has been returned to third place in the Monaco Grand Prix after his Alpine team successfully appealed against a penalty for pit-lane speeding.
The Frenchman was demoted to seventh place after the race by a five-second penalty for exceeding the pit lane speed limit by 0.1km/h.
He was one of five drivers to be penalised for this during the race, an unusually high number.
A ‘right of review’ hearing requested by Alpine established that cars could legally drive a shorter distance in the pit lane than officials had used in their calculations.
The stewards accepted Alpine’s argument, backed up by data, that Gasly had never exceeded the 60km/h limit.
The decision is a blow to Mercedes driver George Russell, who was given a drive-through penalty for pit-lane speeding which dropped him from third place at the time to 13th at the finish.
Russell’s Mercedes team, as well as the teams of the other drivers who were penalised, did not object to the decisions, even though they believed their drivers had not exceeded the limit.
Gasly committed two ‘offences’. The other drivers in addition to Russell were McLaren’s Oscar Piastri, Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton and Gasly’s team-mate Franco Colapinto.
Hamilton’s penalty did not affect his second place as Ferrari managed to serve it in a way that did not penalise him in terms of track position during a safety-car period.
Piastri, who has been dropped to fifth by Gasly’s reinstatement, lost three places in serving his penalty.
The verdict published by the stewards into the right of review hearing said that they had questioned the number of penalties for speeding when the third one occurred.
The statement said: “Race control promptly came back to the stewards stating it had made enquiries of the official timekeepers and was told that there was no issue and that the data was therefore accurate.”
The pit-lane speed limit is measured by using a series of timing loops and the time taken to travel a specific distance along the pit lane.
The report said that changes to the pit lane this year had meant that the shortest possible route between the loops was 77 centimetres less than the distance used to calculate the limit.
Five of the six offences were by cars calculated to be doing 0.1km/h over the limit. The other was 0.4km/h over.
As a result the stewards decided Gasly had not exceeded the pit-lane speed limit.
More to follow.
