Alpine driver Pierre Gasly has regained the third-place finish in the 2026 Monaco Grand Prix that he lost on Sunday afternoon to a pair of pit lane speeding penalties. However, the story may not be over just yet, as rival teams Red Bull Racing and McLaren have served notice of intention to appeal against the latest decision.
The unusual call was made by the stewards after they accepted a right-of-review request from Alpine, and determined there had been a mistake in the speed measurement process in the pit lane.
The key to any right-of-review action in Formula 1 is new evidence, and that came in the form of an admission from the timekeepers—part of the wider F1 organization, rather than the FIA—that there was an error in measurement of one of the timing loops in the pit lane that overstated the actual speed. This was accepted by the stewards.
The outcome in Alpine’s favor has caused some controversy in the paddock, as Gasly was only one of five drivers to be handed a pit speeding penalty. However, while Lewis Hamilton, George Russell, Oscar Piastri, and Gasly’s own teammate Franco Colapinto served their penalties during the race when they made pit stops, Gasly didn’t stop again after receiving his, and thus his penalties were added to his result after the flag.
That meant Alpine still had the option to challenge them and have them cancelled, while the other teams could not. Russell was the biggest victim; when he took the original pit speeding penalty, Mercedes didn’t serve it properly—changing his tires and not waiting the required five seconds—and he subsequently received a drive-through penalty that saw him tumble out of the points.
“For us as a team, and especially for George, it had massive implications,” said Mercedes F1 boss Toto Wolff. “He had difficult a qualifying session, but he moved all the way all the way back up there. And clearly without the penalty—without us not serving it correctly—it would have been a totally different outcome for his race. Whether he would have made the podium or just not is a different question, but a different outcome would have had an impact on his championship situation, and that’s why it’s unfortunate.”
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With Gasly now back in P3, Isack Hadjar, Piastri, Liam Lawson, and Arvid Lindblad have all moved down a place in the results. The teams of the first two have thus taken the first step in the process of challenging the decision with a notice of intention to appeal. Red Bull and McLaren have 96 hours in which to review their cases and decide whether or not to proceed with their appeals.
The pit speeding issue had emerged earlier in the weekend, with Kimi Antonelli, Russell, Fernando Alonso, and Alex Albon or reported for exceeding the limit during practice. That alerted all teams to the fact that they would have to take care, by reducing the speed set by the pit rev limiter and/or telling the drivers to take care on pit entry and exit, and not shorten the distance by cutting across white lines. But when the speeding offenses began to accumulate in Sunday’s race, teams were convinced there was something wrong.
“We were aware that there had been issues with that part of the track on Friday and on Saturday,” said Alpine team principal Steve Nielsen. “So we had some doubts about it, because of that we’d already warned our drivers about it. And when we started seeing all these penalties come in the race, whilst we didn’t know exactly what the error was, it was not unreasonable to think there [was] something wrong. Across a season, you see pit end speeding … it’s one or two [times], maybe four or five in the whole year. So to see six three of which were ours in one afternoon, combined with what we knew about Friday and Saturday—‘Okay, something’s wrong.’ Whilst we didn’t know exactly what it was, we were very sure there was something wrong.”
Convinced that the team’s own data was accurate, Alpine submitted the right of review in the immediate aftermath of the race. “We had very accurate on-car data,” said Nielsen. “And we’ve all incurred pit lane speeding before—and when you incur it, most of the time we see it in our own data before the FIA even tell us. And sometimes they tell us, and we look, and we see it. So every time, you see it. The different thing was, this time, is all our controls engineers were saying there’s nothing in our data. So that, added with the issues we knew from Friday, Saturday, and the number of [violations] … we were very, very sure that we were innocent.”
The right of review was heard in a virtual gathering on Thursday by the four original Monaco stewards, including former F1 driver Derek Warwick. As they acknowledged, others had taken their penalties during the race, but there was no way to reverse them. The stewards noted that “in relation to other cars that were penalized, some served their penalty, and this regrettably impacted their race strategies and therefore their race result. There will undoubtedly remain questions as to whether those breaches were genuine. There is no regulation that gives the stewards the power to ‘undo’ a served penalty. In any case, it is impossible to imagine how such power could be applied. Notably, no other party petitioned for a right of review within the allowable time frame.”
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Piastri took a penalty within the race, and coincidentally, as a result of the Gasly decision he has now dropped from P4 to P5. “I think in the race it was reasonably obvious,” he said when asked by Road & Track about the revelation there was a mistake. “I thought that there was something weird going on. It’s a shame, because it’s obviously impacted the result of the race for one way or another. I got a penalty, and if I didn’t have that penalty to serve, I wouldn’t have pitted again. They can’t change the result now, because so many decisions were made in the race based off the penalties that were given, but that kind of thing shouldn’t be happening in F1.”