McLaren and Red Bull have won their appeals against the Monaco Grand Prix result, stripping Alpine's Pierre Gasly of the third-place finish he had been awarded and dropping him back to seventh.
The ruling, reported by BBC Sport, centers on a 77-centimetre discrepancy between the officially measured distance of the Monaco pit lane and the real shortest route a driver could physically take. That gap became the source of a prolonged legal dispute that dragged on for months after the race.
After the race, Alpine successfully appealed Gasly's two five-second pit-lane speeding penalties. An investigation following the event established that Gasly had not exceeded the 60 km/h pit-lane speed limit when measured over the shorter distance. His penalties were overturned and he was elevated to the podium.
McLaren then appealed that outcome, arguing sporting fairness and pointing to their own competitive losses. Oscar Piastri had served a five-second penalty during the race and lost two championship points as a result. Red Bull joined the appeal on similar grounds.
The court of appeal sided with McLaren and Red Bull. The decision rests on the conclusion that the parameters used to measure pit-lane speed limits could not be changed during or after a grand prix weekend once competitors had been informed of them. The court ruled that sporting fairness "absolutely precludes the retrospective replacement" of an established calibration parameter "by a different geometric or measurement approach for the purpose of re-adjudicating an individual competitor's result."
The court also confirmed that F1 is designated by the FIA to measure the pit-lane speed limit, applied by average speed over the relevant timing sector rather than instantaneous speed, and that the same distance must be applied to each car. Although it was later established that a shorter path through the pit lane was geometrically possible, the benchmark used during the race could not be displaced after the fact for a single competitor.
With Gasly returned to seventh, Red Bull's Isack Hadjar is reinstated to third place and Piastri moves back to fourth. Racing Bulls' Liam Lawson and Arvid Lindblad are moved up to fifth and sixth respectively.
The verdict does not fully resolve every consequence of the pit-lane speeding penalties from that race. Mercedes driver George Russell was dropped out of the points for failing to correctly serve one of those penalties, and the court's ruling does not address all of the downstream effects on drivers across the field. The Italian Grand Prix weekend is now underway, with the Monaco controversy finally, if incompletely, settled.
