Alpine’s request to review Gasly’s pair of five-second pit lane speeding penalties was accepted after new evidence revealed a flaw in the data used to calculate the Frenchman’s speed in Monte Carlo.
Gasly crossed the line third, but was dropped to seventh after being penalised twice for marginal pit lane speeding offences, with Red Bull’s Isack Hadjar promoted onto the podium.
However, the case has created a difficult situation for the FIA, with Gasly not the only driver hit by a penalty during the race.
Piastri, Lewis Hamilton, George Russell and Franco Colapinto were also among those penalised for pit lane speeding, with several of those penalties served during the race rather than added to the final classification.
That has left Piastri convinced the outcome cannot simply be rewritten, even if Alpine’s review ultimately finds Gasly should not have been penalised.
“In the race, it was reasonably obvious, I thought, that there was something weird going on, because maybe you have one or maybe two cars at the same race getting a pit lane speed limit penalty, but not seven or eight, or however many it was,” Piastri said ahead of the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix.
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The unusually high number of penalties raised immediate questions over whether the issue was with the timing system, with Alpine later presenting evidence from Formula One Management that the pit lane measurement used to calculate Gasly’s speed was inaccurate.
That evidence was enough for the stewards to deem Alpine’s right of review admissible, allowing the case to move to a second stage ahead of a decision expected on Friday in Barcelona.
But Piastri said the penalties had already shaped the way the race played out, including McLaren’s strategy on his side of the garage.
“It’s a shame, because it’s obviously impacted the result of the race, one way or another,” he added.
“I got a penalty, and if I didn’t have that penalty to serve, I wouldn’t have pitted it again.”
Piastri finished fourth in Monaco while Russell’s race unravelled further after he was given an additional penalty for not serving his original sanction correctly.
That makes the classification difficult to revisit, with the Australian arguing that too many decisions were made in real time based on the penalties that had already been handed out.
“So, they can’t change the result now, because so many decisions were made in the race based off the penalties that were given, but that kind of thing shouldn’t be happening,” he concluded.
While Alpine’s review has raised the possibility of Gasly’s penalties being rescinded, the process is also aimed at understanding how the sanctions were issued in the first place.
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Piastri said that despite being pleased with fourth in Monaco, the result masked McLaren’s lack of pace, with the Australian hoping the more conventional layout of Barcelona will provide a clearer picture of where the team stands this weekend.
“I think Monaco was tough last week,” he said.
“We were still able to salvage a pretty reasonable result on my side, but we clearly weren’t quick enough to challenge for even for the position we finished. So hopefully we can improve from that.
“Even Canada, until Sunday, was certainly not bad, so hopefully we’ve learnt a few things about some of the conditions we’re in, some of the corner types, and hopefully it’s a bit track specific.
“But we’ll find out this weekend. So it’s going to be a good test on a more normal circuit here to see where everyone stacks up.”
Piastri said McLaren’s issues were not limited to one area, with both reliability and outright pace having hurt the team across the opening part of the season, including teammate Lando Norris’s power-related retirements from the last two races.
However, he said performance remained the bigger priority, arguing that lost pace was harder to recover from than reliability problems once races had already passed.
“I think you can gain the points back from reliability that we’re missing, but you can’t gain the points back from the performance that we’re missing. That’s clear,” he explained.
“So definitely both areas are costly, but at the moment we would be a little bit further ahead, but we wouldn’t be winning.
“It’s not like we’ve cost ourselves any wins or anything like that from reliability. So we clearly need to improve the performance of the car.
“But hopefully once we are in a position to be able to do that, obviously we need to be able to finish the races as well. So both are costly at the moment.
“But the performance is, I would say, the bigger focus at the moment.”
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