Pierre Gasly crossed the line third at the Monaco Grand Prix and climbed out of his Alpine believing he had scored one of the drives of his career. Two five-second penalties for pit-lane speeding then dropped him to seventh, and turned a landmark result into the angriest evening of his season.
"I don't think there is anything that could hurt me more right now," Gasly said. The Frenchman was adamant he had done nothing wrong. "I know for a fact that what's in the car is below the 60kph and I know on both occasions I've put it way before the line." His first infringement was logged at 0.1km/h over the limit, the second at 0.4km/h.
What stung most was the company he kept. Gasly was one of five drivers — alongside Oscar Piastri, George Russell, Franco Colapinto and Lewis Hamilton — caught for marginal pit-lane speeding on the same afternoon. "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," he said. "This is the type of moment that for me can't be taken away from us by unfair reasons."
Hamilton, who served his own five-second penalty and still finished second, pointed to the geometry of the pit entry rather than the drivers. "I think it's just the line that you take, which is the same line we've all taken for years where you come in, you kind of cut part of the white line, head down, went out," he said.
The technical explanation backed him up. At Monaco the pit entry features a kink that lets drivers cut slightly right, and the timing system starts measuring the moment the first wheel crosses into the fast lane. For drivers taking the tighter line, the front-left wheel trips the loop earlier than expected, nudging the averaged speed fractionally over the limit. Race control had warned teams beforehand to use the wider entry — a warning that, on the evidence of five penalties, did not land.
Mercedes had no such recourse. Russell was running in podium contention when the team bungled his own five-second penalty, changing his tyres before serving the time and collecting a drive-through that wrecked his race. "Just major confusion, and getting a drive-through — the punishment doesn't fit the crime," Russell said. Toto Wolff took the blame for the pit error: "We had a bit of confusion ourselves on the strategy, then he came in and we didn't hold him for five seconds. We missed out on a P3 or P4, it's a shame."
For a race already defined by crashes and retirements, it was the stewards' room that produced the longest-running drama — and, in Alpine's case, one that may not be over.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/gasly-robbed-of-monaco-podium-as-pit-lane-penalties-spark-fury). Visit for full coverage.*
