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5 hours ago
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Key events
Preamble
Just when George Russell thought his luck could not get any worse …
Formula One and the FIA would like you to remember the 2026 Monaco Grand Prix for Kimi Antonelli’s fifth straight race win. That was a stunning achievement and one unsullied by what was going on around Mercedes’s young Italian. Lewis Hamilton came in second and no one can argue that the Ferrari driver did not deserve it. Everything else, however …
The string of penalties for pit-lane speeding seemed at first blush to suggest large-scale blundering by the teams; Alpine’s successful appeal against Pierre Gasly’s demotion from third to seventh, granted on Friday, exposed that Formula One itself had been at fault, leaving everyone unhappy except the lawyers. In short, they were measuring the wrong distance, and a swath of drivers – including Hamilton, but to no great detriment – were all deemed, wrongly, to have broken the speed limit by less than 0.1km/h.
No one will be seething more than Russell, whose Mercedes team compounded F1’s error by failing to have him serve his five-second penalty when he pitted again. This meant he then had to do a drive-through, costing him far more than five seconds and leaving him out of the points and now 68 behind his youthful teammate in the championship standings, and two points behind Hamilton.
None of the other teams whose drivers were penalised appealed, and so the current line from the authorities is that they have lost their right to do so because of the FIA’s statute of limitations on race matters. But … lawyers. And those who benefited from Gasly’s demotion are also unhappy at his reinstatement, with Isack Hadjar and Red Bull lodging an intent to appeal against his loss of a podium finish and McLaren doing likewise over Oscar Piastri, who served his five seconds, dropping from fourth to fifth. The teams had 96 hours to turn the lodging of an intent into an actual appeal, so that means we’ll know more by Tuesday at the latest.
Remember, this was the week when (some sort of) peace was supposed to have broken out. Modifications to the balance between petrol and battery for future seasons were agreed, to appease the critics led by Max Verstappen of this year’s regulations, which prevent drivers going flat-out and contributed to Oliver Bearman’s awful crash in Miami.
So that is the backdrop for today’s qualifying session in Barcelona, one that will take place simultaneously in bright sunshine and under a dark cloud.
Join me from 2.30pm for the buildup and 3pm for Q1, and send your thoughts on the racing and the lawyering to [email protected]
