Formula 1 loves to talk about fairness and precedent, right up until sorting out an actual result becomes inconvenient. Nearly three months after the Monaco Grand Prix, nobody, not the drivers, not the teams, not the FIA itself, can say with certainty who finished third. Welcome to the sport’s slowest-moving farce.
Pierre Gasly’s time penalty for pitlane speeding was scrapped a week after the race, restoring him to the final Monaco podium at the expense of Isack Hadjar. That should have been the end of it. Instead, McLaren and Red Bull dragged the matter to the FIA’s International Court of Appeal, the sport’s version of a legal black hole where cases go in and answers rarely come out quickly.
A Full Day in Court and Still No Answer
The hearing took place in Paris and, tellingly, ran for the entire day. That is not the sign of a straightforward case. According to Motorsport.com, a verdict, or at least an explanation of one, could take another two to three weeks on top of the three months already spent arguing about 77 centimetres of pitlane tarmac.
Yes, you read that correctly. The entire saga traces back to a discrepancy of 77cm between two timing loops in the Monaco pitlane, an error significant enough to make the original speeding penalties impossible to prove with any confidence. Seven penalties were originally dished out to six drivers, including Lewis Hamilton, George Russell and Oscar Piastri. Gasly’s case stood apart because Alpine chose not to serve his penalty during the race, leaving it to be applied to his final time instead, which is precisely what opened the door for a post-race review once the timing error came to light.
Why Everyone Feels Hard Done By
Alpine won that argument. The stewards accepted that no speeding infringement could be reliably confirmed and handed Gasly back his third place. Piastri and Hadjar, who had benefited from Gasly’s demotion on the day, lost out again. Cue McLaren and Red Bull marching off to the ICA, dressing up their grievance in the language of sporting principle rather than simply admitting they wanted the points back.
To be fair to Andrea Stella, he did not pretend otherwise. Speaking to the media at Zandvoort ahead of the hearing, he was refreshingly candid about the dual motivation behind the appeal.
“We go to the hearing at the International Court of Appeal with, if you want, a double intent. The first intent is more general than the interest of McLaren. We think that the process that happened after the race in Monaco is a process that needs to be reviewed, from fairness for all competitors.” – Andrea Stella
He went further, arguing that the whole affair sets a troubling precedent for how penalties get served, or rather, not served, in the future.
“The second aspect is the interest of McLaren ourselves. We not only have this level of concern, but we were also materially penalised for having served a penalty that is not appealable, and this even cost us points in the championship.” – Andrea Stella
The Precedent Problem Nobody Can Actually Fix
Here is the uncomfortable truth underneath all the talk of principle: there is no clean solution left. Drivers who served their penalties in the pits, like Russell, who picked up an extra drive-through in a failed attempt to comply and left Monaco with no points at all, cannot retroactively get that time back. Gasly, who avoided serving his in-race because Alpine gambled on the review route, gets to keep the benefit of a timing system that was already known to be broken. Reward the gamble, and you are effectively telling every team on the grid to stop serving penalties and start lawyering up instead. Don’t reward it, and you are punishing a team for correctly identifying that the FIA’s own equipment was faulty.
It is exactly the kind of mess that has plagued F1’s stewarding credibility for a while now, not unlike the confusion still swirling around Red Bull’s engine ranking dispute, where the FIA’s reluctance to show its working leaves everyone guessing. Transparency, it seems, is not this governing body’s strong suit.
This is only the second time an F1 team has taken a case to the ICA since 2019, the last being Alfa Romeo’s unsuccessful and long-forgotten tilt over a clutch infringement involving Kimi Raikkonen. That it has taken seven years for another team to bother suggests either remarkable restraint from the paddock or, more likely, that everyone already knows how much of a slog it is.
A Result That Might Never Feel Right
Whatever the ICA eventually decides, somebody is going to feel cheated. Reinstate Hadjar and you are punishing Gasly for a mistake the stewards themselves admitted was unprovable. Leave Gasly on the podium and you are telling McLaren and Red Bull that turning up to a court in Paris achieved precisely nothing. There is no version of this outcome that restores anyone’s faith in the process, only one that finally, mercifully, ends it.
Three months on, F1 still cannot tell you who finished third in its most glamorous race. If that does not sum up the state of the sport’s decision-making machinery, nothing will. One suspects the ICA’s eventual verdict will satisfy nobody, least of all the fans still waiting for an answer to a question that should have taken days, not seasons.
