Pierre Gasly defends "fair play" F1 Monaco penalty reversal amid looming appeal

Alpine Formula 1 driver Pierre Gasly says that the FIA’s inability to address the pit speeding penalties taken by rivals during the Monaco GP was not a reason to criticise the decision to return his P3.

While George Russell, Oscar Piastri and Lewis Hamilton took their penalties during the race – in Russell’s case, in the form of a drive-through after he failed to serve it correctly the first time round – Gasly didn’t make a further stop, so his penalty was added post-race. 

As a result, he dropped from third place to seventh, but because he had not taken the sanction during the race, this opened the door for Alpine to challenge the penalties with a right of review, which the team succeeded with. With both penalties duly rescinded, he regained his third place.

The fact that other drivers could not have their penalties overturned has led to some criticism of the review outcome from Alpine’s rivals, including Piastri, with Red Bull and McLaren registering their intent to appeal the verdict.

“I'm just going to make something clear,” said Gasly when asked if he felt the third place was rightly his. “I know what we did. I know we were driving at 59 in the pit lane, and we've been accused of driving over 60, which wasn't the case.

“I think what I'm going to say is that it should not be right to penalise me for something that we haven't done, just because others got penalised.

“If a potential mistake was made one time, two times, three times, is not a reason to do it a fourth time. So I think just to draw the line here.

“And then, the second point is, I actually don't know whether Oscar or George oversped or not. I haven't seen their data. I don't know if it's the same issue as we've had, and just based on that, I cannot comment. Obviously, if they didn't, then that's a big shame, and they obviously lost out. And I'm not for that, for sure.”

Gasly stressed that it was a conscious decision by the team not to take the penalties within the race so that they could be addressed afterwards.

“We decided not to box a second time, change the tyre, not to serve the penalty, because we knew that we didn't do anything wrong, and we were going to protest it.

“But at the end of the day, I think for the sport, fair play to FIA and F1. I think when you do a mistake, and they took their responsibilities, in the end, they did well to overturn their decision, because in the end, we did nothing wrong.

“I think on my side all I can say is we did a good quali, overtook Norris at the start, found ourselves in P5 at the second start, we overtook Hadjar on track, and then, from that fact, we crossed the line in P3 So, I don't think it was fair to be put in P7 when we did nothing wrong there.”

Meanwhile, Gasly has had a difficult time in Barcelona. He wasn’t happy with the behaviour of his car on Friday, and the team thus swapped him to the spare chassis for Saturday, only for him to suffer similar issues. He qualified a disappointed 14th.

"We are scratching our heads since the first lap in FP1,” he said when asked about his problems by Crash.net. “Where every lap in Turn 1 and Turn 4, as soon as I brake with my steering straight, the car is sending me left/right, as I'm trying to just go straight.

“I don't understand. I've never had that in 10 years in F1. We've never had that with this car. We don’t understand where it comes from. So absolutely zero confidence, and every lap braking into Turn 1 and Turn 4, I'm just reacting to whatever the car is doing on the way in. It's just been quite a messy weekend so far.”