Alpine’s Pierre Gasly finished third on track and thus in a podium position at last weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix, but the immediate end-of-race application of two five-second penalties for alleged speeding in the pit lane had dropped him down the official finishing order to seventh and cost both him and his team valuable Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championship points. However, the experienced French driver and Alpine’s management were perplexed as to how this could have happened and immediately requested a Right of Review hearing, which took place on Thursday at the start of the Barcelona weekend, with the stewards on duty in Monaco present.

The team simply asked for an explanation from the stewards as to what they had done wrong to pick up the penalties and to enquire if perhaps the situation could have been better handled by the officials at the time. In their defence, the stewards were simply reacting to data provided by the monitoring system as the race progressed, but on Friday there was an admission from Formula One Management that the equipment for checking pit lane speeds had been set up incorrectly and that both of Gasly’s penalties were therefore rescinded retrospectively, returning him to third place and therefore demoting Isack Hadjar, Oscar Piastri, Liam Lawson and Arvid Lindblad by a place each.

The other drivers who had picked up pit lane speeding penalties in Monaco were either unaffected by the change or had already served their penalties during a pit stop, with the regulations not giving the stewards any option for further corrective action. Also, none of the other impacted teams had requested a Right of Review hearing, unlike Alpine. However, the Mercedes part owner and team principal, Toto Wolff, said in Barcelona on Friday that it was consulting its lawyers as to whether any legal challenge might be possible to assist George Russell, who was involved in the debacle and had finished outside of the points. Also, McLaren and Red Bull have indicated that they are intending to appeal against the stewards’ decision to reinstate Gasly to third.

It was certainly very unusual to have six such infringements in a single Grand Prix, and Alpine insisted that it had set its speed limiter at 59.5kph and thus under the maximum 60kph maximum speed allowed in the tight Monaco pit lane. This might sound like a very small margin, but in F1 terms it really isn't, and the process simply relies on the driver activating his pitlane speed limiter at the appropriate point before entering the restricted area, which the team could easily prove via telemetry.

Formula One Management checks the speed of cars in the pit lane throughout every F1 round and does so by basically timing how long it takes a car to get from an initial checkpoint to a later one, enabling the system to calculate average speeds and instantly identify any offenders. An alternative system would involve the use of a few unlinked speed cameras in the pitlane, but the approach would very much be open to abuse by drivers and teams to gain an unfair advantage, a bit like people knowing where speed cameras are on public roads and slowing from above the speed limit as they pass before again increasing their speed.

The veteran Fernando Alonso may have scored the first point of the season for his latest F1 team, Aston Martin, in Monaco a week ago, but the Spanish driver has subsequently claimed that he took absolutely no positives from the race nor the result, which benefited from penalties applied to others. Instead, he feels the outfit is further away than ever from making decent progress up the grid, with the list of the Adrian Newey-designed and Honda-powered car’s problems simply increasing rather than decreasing. Qualifying dead last for this weekend’s Grand Prix, outpaced by his teammate, Lance Stroll, the son of the outfit’s Canadian owner, Lawrence Stroll, hardly helped his demeanour, and he intends to make a decision about his future during F1’s forthcoming summer break.



In other news, just ahead of the start of the Barcelona round, there was an official announcement that Formula One Management, the FIA governing body, the teams and the power unit manufacturers had jointly agreed on future changes to the controversial new technical regulations introduced this season. In essence, the split between internal combustion engine power and electrical propulsion is currently roughly 50/50, but from the start of the 2027 campaign, there will be a gradual increase in the petrol element, and from 2028 onwards, the ratio between the two will be 60/40 in favour of the internal combustion engine. It is hoped that these changes may pacify the many drivers who dislike the 2026 regulations, including leading figures such as the current world champion, Lando Norris, and the four-time champion, Max Verstappen.



On a lighter note, fame and fortune come in many guises in the modern world we all live in, and the 45-year-old American media personality Kim Kardashian certainly attracted some justified criticism on several fronts during her visit to the Monaco Grand Prix as a VIP guest supporting Lewis Hamilton. She and her minders were widely condemned for their unacceptable behaviour towards Sky F1’s Martin Brundle during one of his legendary pre-race grid walks, and she subsequently helped herself to the towel that had been positioned for the use of the victorious Kimi Antonelli at the later podium celebrations. F1 fans worldwide were delighted when, on arrival in Spain, young Antonelli and his Mercedes team colleagues posted a highly amusing short video on social media, with him asking, “Have you seen my towel?”, mocking Kardashian.