Lewis Hamilton Backs Gasly as FIA’s Monaco Pit Lane Chaos Heads Into a Full Review
· Yahoo Sports
Lewis Hamilton walked away from Monaco with a second-place finish. Pierre Gasly walked away with nothing. Not officially, anyway.
Gasly was among an unusually large number of drivers penalised for exceeding Monaco’s 60 km/h pit lane speed limit, with two separate infringements dropping him from third at the chequered flag all the way to seventh.
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Hamilton himself was caught by the same issue. Now he’s responded to what happened.
“I think it’s probably more just about making improvements in the future so those things don’t happen. Pierre was really, really unlucky, he did such a great job to get to where he was and there were a lot of penalties and some of them I haven’t seen the actual speed but I know I’ve been in this scenario where we’ve been 0.1 over the speed limit and it’s like it doesn’t make a difference…”
The Measurement Problem Everyone Is Now Talking About
The likely cause of the penalty frenzy is drivers cutting the pit lane entry too aggressively once inside it. The way F1 calculates pit lane speed is through electronic timing loops embedded in the track surface – and too aggressive a cut at either the start or end of the fast lane shortens the time taken to pass between the loops, with the system registering a breach even if the car‘s limiter is correctly engaged.
In Monaco, five of the six in-race transgressions were measured at exactly 60.1 km/h. Hamilton’s own position is that he wasn’t actually over the limit at all.
He supports the line-cutting theory and believes it was the cause of his own penalty, saying simply: “Yeah, I wasn’t speeding. I think it’s just the way the pitlane is.”
George Russell, Kimi Antonelli, Alex Albon, and Fernando Alonso all picked up penalties for exceeding the limit by 0.5 km/h or less.
Teams were warned during the race weekend, but the alerts arrived too late for several drivers. Gasly’s two offences were measured at 0.1 km/h and 0.4 km/h over the 60 km/h threshold. He had delivered one of the standout drives of the afternoon, climbing from ninth on the grid to third after overtaking Lando Norris at the start and passing Isack Hadjar at the final restart.
To have that undone by fractions of a kilometre per hour – margins that exist because of a pit entry geometry quirk – is a genuinely difficult thing to defend.
The Review That Could Change Monaco’s Result
Alpine presented data at a hearing showing Gasly had activated his pit lane speed limiter before the entry point and, per their evidence, had not exceeded the speed limit. The FIA has officially accepted Alpine’s petition for a Right of Review.
Speaking in the Barcelona paddock ahead of Sunday’s race, Gasly described the lost podium as the biggest setback of his sporting career, saying: “I think to me it’s fair to say this was the hardest day I’ve ever had in F1 and in my sporting career.”