Slipstream Saturdays: When a Race Is a Farce

The results from Monaco turned into a farce on Friday (Jun 12) when the FIA amazingly offered a mea culpa to Pierre Gasly after dropping him from third to seventh at Monaco last Sunday.  Gasly had incurred two five-second penalties for speeding on pit lane but had not served them during the race. Isack Hadjar saw the podium for the first time as a result of the officiating call.

After the race, Gasly opined, “I am absolutely heartbroken by the outcome of today’s race. I have so many emotions right now, not only after such a challenging weekend where you are on the limit so often and pushing so much, but also to have a lifelong dream of a Monaco podium taken away from me for reasons which I just cannot comprehend.

“I know I was under the pit lane speed limit and activated it much before the line. We also have margin for these occurrences to not go over, so I just hope they can review it properly and give us back the result all of us at the team deserve.”

Alpine pushed for a review during the week, and in a stunning moment of Formula 1 showing egg on its face, they admitted to the timing loops on pit lane being mismanaged. Say what?

So, five drivers all earned penalties for speeding. Gasly had been the only one not to serve his penalties. He benefited from staying out and opting to take the penalties after the race, while the others all had their race results corrupted by the timing errors. George Russell, who totally lost his way after having to serve a penalty under green flag conditions, suffered perhaps the most.

As a result, Mercedes is considering legal action to investigate how to amend the results. Mercedes is seeing the big picture, focusing on how race results are tied to the constructors standings, which are then tied to the year-end payout. Eyes on the prize.

First, we need to discuss what went wrong in Monaco. The simple explanation is that the officials in charge of determining pit lane speed messed up in how they measured the distance for calculating the average speed. The officials used the distance measured from 2025 without accounting for the changes made for 2026.

To go into more detail, as offered from Racer.com, “the stewards found in their review that both the FIA and Formula One Management (FOM) were aware that ‘the distance used in calculating the F1 official timing (and hence the pit lane speed) was inaccurate’ and thereby incorrectly estimated Gasly’s speed. The report stated that the measurement used to calculate speed was out by 77cm (30.3in). Gasly had originally been found to have been speeding by 0.1km/h and 0.4km/h (0.06mph and 0.25mph).

This miscalculation means that all the speeding penalties are up for review, in theory. The fact that Oscar Piastri served his penalty does not mean that the penalty was insignificant, as he lost three spots when serving his five-second penalty. This snafu affects all aspects of the results.

In so many ways, the overall outcome, save for Kimi Antonelli running away with the win, is a farce. This scenario is an obvious example of poison droplets tainting all the water in the well. Nothing about the validity of the results makes sense.

The next thing to consider is how this kind of circus affects races going forward. Teams now have credible evidence to support keeping a driver on track to ignore a penalty, even though they likely would not do so; it provides a basis that goes beyond the normal questioning of rule infractions.

Nothing about changing Gasly’s result looks good, and the likelihood of voiding the overall results is improbable. The question will be whether or not Mercedes goes through with legal action,and if so, what the outcome would be. Regardless, what a sad outcome for what is considered such a prestigious race.