Red Bull is preparing to take the Pierre Gasly Monaco penalty saga a step further, and Laurent Mekies is making it clear this isn’t just about the podium Isack Hadjar thought he’d earned.
Gasly was originally hit with two five-second penalties for pit-lane speeding in Monaco — a decision that, on the road, kicked the Alpine driver from third down to seventh. That promoted Hadjar into the top three for what would’ve been his first podium with the senior Red Bull team.
But Alpine then succeeded with a post-race Right of Review, overturning both penalties after Formula One Management acknowledged the distance used in the calculation was inaccurate and “overstated the speed”. With that, Gasly’s podium was reinstated and Hadjar’s was taken away.
Red Bull has indicated it intends to appeal the stewards’ reversal, and Mekies has framed the move as a wider push for consistency in how the sport handles penalties that are supposed to be “non-appealable” during the race — and what happens when the process leaves teams with radically different options after the chequered flag.
“We have not yet submitted the full appeal. We have a bit of time for that,” Mekies said when asked about Red Bull’s next step. “But we think it’s more so a matter of principle for the goodness of the sport, in order for the sport to get the right clarity on how we go about non-appealable penalties during the race, and getting the right results at the end of the race.”
The Monaco pit lane, as ever, became a story in itself. Five drivers were penalised for speeding, and McLaren’s Oscar Piastri was among them. Piastri didn’t hide his disbelief at the subsequent reversal in Gasly’s case, describing himself as “mind blown” — and the frustration is easy to understand from a competitor’s point of view.
The key difference was procedural. Gasly didn’t pit to serve his penalties, meaning the 10 seconds were added to his race time. That left Alpine the door open to pursue a Right of Review after the race. Piastri, by contrast, served his penalty in-race — which meant McLaren couldn’t go back in afterwards even if it believed the underlying measurement was flawed.
That asymmetry has become the flashpoint. Gasly has already fired back at rivals by arguing others could have taken the same approach Alpine did — essentially choosing not to serve a penalty so an appeal route remains available. But it’s precisely the kind of gamesmanship Mekies appears to be warning the sport about: not necessarily the letter of the rules being broken, but the incentives becoming distorted.
Mekies acknowledged the messy reality of speed measurement, but his argument was that teams have long since been operating to a known reference — imperfect or not.
“No measurement system is perfect on us. There is not one single way to measure the speed, and they are all wrong,” he said. “However, we have been working with that measurement system for a very high number of years. It was the same than the day before, to same than on Friday, to same than the previous years, and we have all adapted to it, and 17 or 18 cars have managed to be legal.
“So we just need to make sure that as a sport we have a solid enough approach, so that moving forward we get the right clarity to the fans and to the competitors.”
It’s notable that Red Bull isn’t alone in wanting the decision scrutinised. McLaren has also indicated an intention to appeal the rescinding of Gasly’s penalties, while Mercedes has requested a Right of Review after the “disastrous impact” of George Russell’s speeding penalty on his own Monaco race.
Taken together, it underlines why this has grown beyond a single podium swap. The sport doesn’t just have an optics problem — it has a competitive integrity problem if two drivers can commit the same infringement, receive the same punishment, and yet only one has any realistic pathway to get it overturned.
That’s where Mekies’ “principle” argument lands. If the paddock begins to believe the smart play is to keep a penalty unserved to preserve post-race leverage, race control ends up incentivising the opposite of what penalties are designed to do: correct behaviour in the moment and settle the order on track.
For Red Bull, there’s a sharper edge too. Hadjar’s lost podium is tangible, but so is the championship context. Alpine sits fifth in the 2026 Constructors’ standings, 32 points behind Red Bull — and in a midfield-to-front fight where margins matter, a Monaco points swing is exactly the kind of thing that lingers into the second half of the year.
Now the ball is in the procedural court. Red Bull says it hasn’t lodged the full appeal yet, but Mekies’ tone suggests the team sees this as a line worth drawing — not just for what happened in Monaco, but for what the ruling might quietly encourage next time the pit-lane speed trap becomes the story.
