Yuki Tsunoda gets to keep the one thing his season has been desperately short of: a point. The stewards at Monza have cleared him of any wrongdoing over his chaotic restart, and the reasoning tells you more about the state of the rulebook than it does about his driving.
The short version of what happened on track: Tsunoda finished the Italian Grand Prix in tenth for Racing Bulls, his first point since stepping back into the seat, only for a post-race investigation into his restart to put that result in doubt. That threat has now evaporated, and it’s worth understanding exactly why.
A Restart That Went Sideways, Literally
The whole mess traces back to Charles Leclerc’s enormous crash on lap two, which triggered a lengthy red flag. When the field lined up for the restart on lap six, Tsunoda approached the grid seemingly unsure whether he was starting fourteenth or fifteenth. Cameras caught him initially heading for the wrong side of his box before correcting himself and settling into position, a bit of grid-based confusion that was enough to spook race control into ordering an extra formation lap rather than risk starting the race with a car potentially out of place.
Tsunoda himself admitted afterwards he wasn’t entirely sure where he stood. “I was a bit confused starting between 14 and 15,” he said, as reported by Motorsport.com. “In my view, I didn’t really gain the position before the red flag. I thought I was 15th. But at least I parked behind the box, pretty far, so I don’t think I gained any advantage for that.”
That confusion was enough to get him summoned to the stewards, and enough for plenty of people watching to assume his point was as good as gone.
The Verdict: Not a False Start, and Not His Fault Either
Here’s where it gets interesting, because the stewards didn’t just wave the whole thing away. They went through the video evidence from multiple camera angles and confirmed that while Tsunoda’s car initially drifted toward the wrong side of the grid, he corrected course and ended up “in the correct grid box and in the correct position within the grid box.” Under Article B5.1.1c, that means no contact patch of his front tyres was outside the grid box lines, which by definition rules out a false start.
So why the extra formation lap at all? According to the stewards’ written verdict, that decision came entirely from the race director, who said he acted “out of an abundance of caution” based on how Tsunoda’s car looked as it approached the grid, and admitted he simply wasn’t comfortable starting the race with the car in that position. Crucially, nobody ever told Tsunoda or his team that they were considered the cause of the delay.
That last point turned out to be decisive. Article B5.9.4 states that a driver who causes an extra formation lap must start the following lap from the pit lane, and it’s only failure to do that which triggers a mandatory stop-and-go penalty. But you can hardly be expected to peel off into the pit lane over a problem nobody told you that you’d caused.
| Stewards’ finding | Conclusion |
|---|---|
| Grid box position | Car fully within the correct box, no false start |
| Cause of extra formation lap | Race director’s precautionary call, not directly attributed to Tsunoda |
| Team/driver notification | Never told they were considered the cause |
| Impact on other drivers | None |
| Penalty applied | No further action |
An Admission the Rulebook Has a Hole In It
The stewards didn’t stop at clearing Tsunoda. Their written verdict effectively flags a gap in F1’s own regulations, noting that a driver can only be expected to comply with the pit-lane requirement if he actually knows he’s the one who caused the delay in the first place. In this case, no such message ever reached Racing Bulls.
The stewards went further still, suggesting the FIA “might wish to consider implementing a process to advise teams and drivers if they are considered to be the cause of an extra formation lap.” Translated out of stewards’-report language, that’s a polite way of saying the current system leaves drivers guessing about penalties they can’t possibly avoid unless someone tells them what’s going on. It’s a fair point, and one that should have been obvious before Monza rather than after it.
A Rare Bit of Good News for Tsunoda
Whatever the procedural nuance, the outcome matters far more to Tsunoda than the small print. This has been a brutal return to a Formula 1 cockpit for a driver who lost his regular seat and has been deputising for Liam Lawson while Lawson covers for the injured Isack Hadjar at Red Bull. A stewards’ summons threatening to strip his first point of the season away would have been a fittingly grim footnote to a tough weekend that also saw his own qualifying performance leave him starting deep in the pack.
Instead, Tsunoda gets to walk away from Monza with something concrete on the board, sitting on a single point in the drivers’ standings after a season that has otherwise offered him almost nothing. It’s not a result that changes his trajectory, but for a driver fighting to remind people he still belongs on the grid, keeping hold of it matters more than the stewards’ paperwork might suggest.
A Gap That Needs Closing
What this saga really exposes is a rulebook written for tidier scenarios than the one Monza actually produced. A race director acting cautiously, a driver genuinely unsure of his own grid slot, and a penalty framework that only bites if someone bothers to tell the driver he’s the problem: that’s not a robust system, it’s a series of assumptions that happened to hold up this time. Next time a race director orders an extra formation lap without telling anyone why, the FIA might not be so lucky, and a driver further up the order than fourteenth could find himself losing a result over exactly the same confusion that let Tsunoda keep his.
