Pierre Gasly has got his Monaco podium back — and, as ever with the principality, the order of the day didn’t truly settle until the paperwork did.
Alpine launched a right of review after the race, challenging the pair of five-second penalties that had been applied to Gasly. Following a stewards’ hearing, both penalties were removed, which restores Gasly to the podium positions and drops Isack Hadjar out of the top three.
It’s a sizeable swing in a race where track position is practically currency, and where five seconds can be the difference between a champagne shower and a footnote. For Gasly, it flips the post-race narrative completely: from having a Monaco result blunted by sanction to leaving the weekend with one of the most valuable finishes on the calendar.
For Alpine, it’s not just points reclaimed — it’s a statement of intent. The team didn’t shrug and move on; it went back in, found enough new material to trigger the right of review mechanism, and convinced the stewards that the original decisions didn’t stand. In a season where margins are thin and reputations are formed as much in the stewards’ room as on the stopwatch, that kind of procedural win matters.
Hadjar, meanwhile, is the collateral damage. Losing a podium in Monaco is brutal at the best of times, but especially so when you’ve already done the hard part — surviving the walls, the strategy games, and the slow-motion tension that comes with defending or attacking around streets that punish even optimism. The demotion doesn’t necessarily say anything about Hadjar’s Sunday; it says everything about how decisive these late calls can be once the rulebook gets its second read.
There will be plenty of paddock chatter about what this means beyond the trophy cabinet. Monaco points are never “just” points, and a reversed decision like this tends to sharpen the competitive instincts up and down the pitlane: teams will be quicker to challenge, drivers will be more forceful in their post-race debriefs, and everyone will be poring over precedents because nobody wants to be the one leaving a podium on the table.
Gasly, though, won’t care about any of that today. The record books now show him on the Monaco podium in 2026 — and that’s the kind of correction that can lift an entire campaign.
