As Oscar Piastri pointed out during Thursday’s press conference in Austria, a month on from the Monaco Grand Prix, the race result still isn’t fully settled.
Pierre Gasly has his P3 trophy, handed over by Isack Hadjar at the Red Bull Ring, after three weeks sitting in Hadjar’s possession, but McLaren‘s appeal against the appeal means the podium that trophy represents remains, officially, contested.
It’s a tricky place for Formula 1 to find itself in, and as the paddock reconvened in Spielberg, the conversation moved past the specifics of what happened in Monaco and onto something more interesting: what happens next time.
Piastri framed his views quite bluntly on Thursday.
“The risk we have now is that any time a team or a driver feels a penalty is potentially wrong, they have a chance of changing it,” the Australian said.
“You go through this whole saga where we still don’t officially know the results of the race a month later, which I think is the biggest thing.”
Piastri served his penalty in the race
His worry isn’t really about Monaco anymore, but about the precedent it sets.
If a penalty can be successfully appealed days after the chequered flag, what’s stopping every aggrieved team from trying the same thing?
Piastri’s understandable worry is that the results are provisional for a month at a time, litigated rather than raced.
Gasly, who benefited from exactly the kind of correction Piastri is wary of, sees it differently, or at least framed it differently when asked about it.
“If a mistake was made and can be corrected because something was unfairly given for no wrongdoing, then in that case, if there is a chance to correct it, I think that is the right thing for the sport to do,” said the Alpine driver, sitting alongside Piastri.
“I was very pleased by the action and the outcome of the decision post-race, but obviously from McLaren’s point of view, or Oscar’s point of view, or George [Russell]’s situation, I completely understand that they probably feel some sense of injustice from what’s been done to them.”
It’s a hard position to argue against in the abstract: nobody wants Formula 1 clinging to a wrong decision purely because it’s inconvenient to overturn. There have already been cases of that before – most notably Abu Dhabi 2021 – and no one really benefits from it.
Gasly finally got his trophy this week
Grand Prix Photo
It’s also worth weighing Gasly’s principle against the sport’s most infamous unrectified mistake.
The 2021 Abu Dhabi finale was decided by a safety car restart that didn’t follow the regulations as written – only some lapped cars were allowed to pass, contrary to the rules – handing Max Verstappen a final-lap shot at the title he duly took.
That mistake was never corrected; the race result stood, the championship was settled, and Formula 1’s response was to rewrite the relevant rule for the future rather than revisit what had already happened.
Monaco suggests the sport is now more willing to correct the record after the fact than it was in 2021, though a mismeasured pitlane distance and a title-deciding restart call are not, in fairness, mistakes of equal weight or equal difficulty to unwind.
Gasly, however, was also careful to draw a line around his and his team’s own involvement.
“That has nothing to do with Alpine or our own race. That’s something they need to sort out on their side,” he said of McLaren’s grievance, even though Alpine’s corrected penalty is the direct cause of it.
It’s obviously a comfortable position to hold: support the principle, but decline ownership of its consequences, and you can’t really blame Gasly for that because, after all, he did cross the chequered flag third on the road.
So did Monaco actually hand every team a blueprint for re-litigating bad weekends, or is Piastri’s fear overstated?
The answer sits in a detail Mark Hughes raised on the Motor Sport Show last week, and it’s the part of this conversation that’s been undersold elsewhere: the overturned penalty wasn’t won on argument or sentiment. It was won on new evidence.
Specifically, the discovery that the measured pitlane distance itself was wrong, which meant the average speed calculation behind a wave of penalties was wrong too.
As Hughes put it, anyone convinced the measurement was flawed had “got to be pretty confident that you can measure it yourself, and then present that as the new evidence,” because that’s always the key to getting a penalty overturned.
That’s a meaningfully higher bar than thinking the penalty was unfair.
It’s not an appeal on judgment, where one team’s view of a borderline call gets swapped for another’s. It’s an appeal on a factual, physical error – a number that was provably, measurably wrong, independent of who was driving.
That framing suggests Monaco was the appeal system working as it’s supposed to when a genuine, demonstrable mistake is uncovered. The pitlane was the wrong length, that’s not a matter of interpretation.
The distinction matters for whether Piastri’s fear plays out.
A team unhappy with a 10-second penalty for overly aggressive on-track driving has no equivalent ‘new evidence’ to bring; the stewards’ judgment call doesn’t become factually wrong with time, the way a mismeasured distance does.
Both Piastri and Russell lost out at a result of FOM’s mistake
The gamble on a future correction is a risky way to run a race, precisely because most penalties don’t have a hidden factual error waiting to be uncovered.
In that sense, Monaco wasn’t a loophole. It was a fairly narrow, fairly rare set of circumstances that happened to be provable after the fact.
Pierre Gasly has his Monaco podium back, for now. But the measurement failure might need more answers before the issue is settled
By
Pablo Elizalde
All of the above doesn’t make Piastri wrong to flag the optics problem, though.
Even a correctly-applied, narrow precedent has still produced a race result that’s unresolved a month later, and that’s a real cost to the sport regardless of how sound the underlying principle is.
Piastri’s “we still don’t officially know the results of the race a month later” line is, on its own, a fair criticism of the process, even if the substance of the appeal was justified.
What Alpine and McLaren’s Monaco appeals may have actually exposed, then, isn’t a crisis of stewarding integrity so much as a crisis of speed.
In this instance, the new-evidence bar appears to be working as intended; it’s the timeline for resolving disputes against that bar that left the sport in limbo for weeks, and which McLaren’s ongoing counter-appeal now threatens to extend further still.
If Formula 1 wants to avoid a repeat, the fix probably isn’t tightening what counts as valid evidence. It’s making sure that when it does emerge, the sport can act on it considerably faster than it has.
