Alpine requests FIA ‘right of review’ over penalties which cost Monaco GP podium

Pierre Gasly said he had been “robbed” of a podium in Monaco after finishing third on the road, and his team agrees.

The Alpine team posted a statement which read: “After the result of today’s Monaco Grand Prix, BWT Alpine Formula One Team can confirm it has requested a Right of Review from the FIA following the penalties applied for pit lane speeding.”

Both Gasly and Franco Colapinto were penalised for exceeding the pitlane speed limit – twice in Gasly’s case, resulting in 10 seconds being added to his race time. That dropped him from third place on the road to seventh overall.

There appear to be questions to answer here, since Gasly and Colapinto were not the only drivers to be penalised for the same offence. Lewis Hamilton, who was classified second, also collected a penalty but was able to serve it while pitting again under the late-race safety car.

Oscar Piastri and George Russell were among the others to be penalised, and several teams warned their drivers to be cautious about how they approached the pit entry. Gasly’s second penalty for speeding came when he was bunched up in the field following the safety car through the pitlane – and it’s understood the margin on both occasions was less than 1km/h over the limit.

“I know for a fact that what’s in the car is below the 60kph [speed limit],” Gasly told media including Motorsport.com after the race.

“And I know on both occasions I’ve put it [the pitlane speed limiter] way before the line. That’s probably the most simple setting you can put in a Formula 1 car.

“When you have three or four teams that get caught for speeding… Hopefully it rings a bell to the guys that they need to check exactly what’s going on because it’s just not right.”

In Formula 1 the pitlane speed limit is not enforced by a single speed ‘gun’, since this would create an obvious loophole for teams to exploit. It is calculated as an average in the so-called “fast lane” using the FIA transponders and electronic timing loops embedded in the track surface.

This has created unusual scenarios in the past, such as in Singapore in 2009 when Sebastian Vettel was penalised for speeding in the pitlane. Although his Red Bull team subsequently provided data to back up its claim that Vettel had never exceeded the speed limit, and he had simply taken a different line at the pit entry, the result stood.

Interestingly, Alex Albon was warned that the penalties were related to “cutting the line around the Cadillac area”. There is a school of thought that the slightly different configuration of the pit exit this year, to allow for the space required by an additional F1 team, has tempted several drivers to stray over the line denoting the fast lane as it curves left towards the exit.

But Alpine faces almost insurmountable hurdles in securing a successful right of review. The bar to this has been set very high to dissuade teams from making fatuous protests.

The test is that the team must provide a “significant and relevant new element” of evidence which was unavailable to the stewards when the original decision was made.

In this case, it’s understood that the FIA discussed the issue of the pitlane configuration with the teams before the event, hence the drivers being cautioned to keep their noses clean at the pit entry and exit. Given the method of calculating average speeds, snipping off a few centimetres here and there could easily make a car look like it was exceeding the limit even when it wasn’t.

Given the requirement for evidence to be “significant and new”, Alpine’s chances of success are quite small.

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– The Motorsport.com Team

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