it took three months to decide who finished third in monaco
pierre gasly has lost his monaco podium for the second time, and the FIA now has three different answers for one pit lane.
quick question. who finished third in the monaco grand prix?
on 7 june the answer was isack hadjar. pierre gasly crossed the line third in the alpine, but he had two five-second penalties for speeding in the pit lane (by less than one km/h, in a 60 zone), and they dropped him to seventh.
on 12 june the answer was gasly (i wrote a whole post about it). alpine asked for a right of review and argued that the distance used to time cars through the pit entry had been measured wrong. the stewards agreed, decided he never broke the limit, and gave him the podium back.
this week the answer became hadjar again. mclaren and red bull appealed, the FIA’s international court of appeal heard the case in paris on 25 august, and the verdict landed just in time for monza. both penalties are back, gasly is seventh, and hadjar collects a podium while he is out with a broken wrist.
the court’s logic, as far as i can follow it: every team set its pit limiter against the same official measurement that weekend, so you cannot swap in a different one after the race. fine. i actually get that. several drivers were done for the same thing in monaco, including george russell, who served his penalty during the race and can never get it back.
but on penalties like russell’s, the same verdict admits there will “undoubtedly remain questions as to whether those breaches were genuine”. so the FIA’s own court thinks monaco’s speeding penalties might have been for nothing, and they stand anyway.
this is what drives me crazy about the FIA. i have said before that you will not get consistent decisions without a permanent group of stewards who are at every race, and now we have the same pit lane and the same data producing three different results. if the people in charge can’t agree on what 60 km/h is, what chance do the rest of us have?
and look at who bothered. mclaren sent lawyers to paris so oscar piastri could move from fifth to fourth in a race from june. that is two points. red bull gets three more for hadjar.
alpine loses nine, and that one hurts. before the verdict they were three points behind racing bulls in the fight for fifth in the constructors. now it is 70 to 54, and that gap was decided in a courtroom almost three months after the chequered flag.
i feel for gasly. he started ninth and dragged an alpine to third on the road at monaco, and the record books will say P7. alpine says it acknowledges the ruling but still maintains the car “did not exceed the pit lane speed limit at any point during the race”. i believe them, for whatever that is worth.
anyway, there is an actual race this weekend. monza is on sunday at 16:00 here in riyadh, hadjar is still out, and liam lawson keeps the red bull seat. prediction: hamilton puts a ferrari on the podium and the tifosi forgive everything. see you after the race.