The reinstatement of Pierre Gasly’s podium finish has received a lot of reactions online. The Mercedes-AMG team is reportedly seeking help from lawyers, while McLaren and Red Bull are said to be mulling their decision to raise an appeal. 

Amidst this, McLaren driver Oscar Piastri has now weighed in. As one of the drivers affected by the pit lane speeding penalties, he feels the entire scenario is murky and that it sets a bad precedent for future races.

“How you can then change one penalty, knowing that probably five or six other races have been impacted by that, is astonishing. So, I mean, you know, I've obviously lost the position, but you can only imagine how George is feeling, so I could not believe my eyes for that," he said while speaking to the media.

"I lost the position because I served the penalty, so technically I should be P3, but then technically George (Russell) should be P3, and the whole thing is now a mess."

At Monaco, Russell was running in P3, but a series of penalties dropped him to P12.

Piastri continued, "It's quite the predicament they've got themselves into, and I don't know how you get yourself out of that one, because now the precedent as it is is you don't serve the penalty, you take it to court, wait probably a few months to decide the race, and who the h*** wants to go racing like that?”

Piastri argues that only Gasly getting cleared of the penalty is unfair, considering that many other drivers had been affected by the same penalty. This was proven by the Alpine team and later the FOM itself to be due to an error in the distance measuring system, which overestimated the speed of Gasly and other drivers’ cars in the pit lane. 

Furthermore, no provision in the F1 rulebook allows a served penalty to be reversed, which only makes this matter more complicated.

After the race, all drivers got their positions based on the penalties served. But with Gasly being the only one reinstated, Piastri feels the situation only gets more complicated. 

Let’s get to the Mercedes camp for a bit now. 

Toto Wolff: “We Definitely Have To Give It A Go”

With George Russell in particular feeling the brunt of the situation, the Mercedes-AMG team is reportedly seeking legal help to challenge the penalties that wrecked his chances of points contention in Monaco. 

Toto Wolff argues that the drive-through penalty is what created the difference between points and no points for Russell at Monaco. While the Team Principal knows that the consequences cannot be reversed now, he still wants to take a fighting chance. 

“We were on the phone with our lawyers to look at what can we do for George. The drive-through, if it didn’t happen at the end, is the equivalent of 20 seconds’ race time. 

Do we think that we realistically have a chance of reversing the result? I don’t think so. But we definitely have to give it a go if we see that there is a millimetre of chance to do so, and bring him back to whatever it was - P4, we’ve calculated, P3 or P4.”

That said, Russell finally had some form of redemption at the Barcelona-Catalunya GP, where he finished a much-needed P2 after starting from pole. He just couldn’t keep up with Lewis Hamilton (see what we did there?), who scored his maiden win for Ferrari, thus ending the Silver Arrows’ win streak this season. 

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Written by

Aaradhya Singh

Edited by

Suyashdeep Sason