The 2026 Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix podium saga takes a new turn as allegations of bias are unearthed against the FIA International Court of Appeal, but when and where will it all end?
The governing body’s highest appellate tribunal, the ICA [International Court of Appeal], allowed an appeal filed jointly by McLaren and Red Bull against Pierre Gasly’s podium reinstatement at the Monaco GP on Friday.
The four-judge bench rendered a 26-page verdict, ruling not only that the stewards had overstepped their jurisdiction by reversing Gasly’s two five-second time penalties, but also that the Frenchman was in fact guilty of breaching the pit lane speed limit on both occasions.
The hearing, held on the 25th of August behind closed doors at FIA headquarters in Paris, had representatives from the FIA, FOM, and all 11 teams in attendance.
The controversy arose when five drivers, including Gasly and McLaren’s Oscar Piastri, were imposed with time penalties for purportedly having breached the 60 km/h Monaco pit lane speed limit.
Piastri was running ahead of the Alpine driver but dove into the pits to serve the penalty, as did the others, thereby ‘conceding’ to the legitimacy of the stewards’ decision.
Gasly, however, did not serve his penalty during the race, finishing third on the road, but was post-facto demoted from the podium after the 10 seconds were added to his total race time.
After the event, the FIA and FOM realised that the timing loop system had erroneously dished out the speeding alerts – the drivers having taken a ‘shorter’ route towards the pit lane, triggering the system.
In fact, Gasly revealed that the team had, as an abundance of caution, set his pit limiter to 59.5 km/h instead of 60 km/h.
Therefore, as Gasly had not served his penalty, Alpine still had its ‘Right to Review’ intact, and based on this ‘new evidence’, challenged the decision successfully. The stewards then reinstated the Frenchman back onto the podium, denying Isack Hadjar his maiden Red Bull podium.
Aggrieved by the stewards’ decision, McLaren and Red Bull appealed to the ICA. The ICA ruled in favour of McLaren and Red Bull, taking a divergent view from that of Alpine and the stewards.
Why was Pierre Gasly stripped of his Monaco GP podium?
In a nutshell, the ICA decided that the decision of the stewards to reinstate Gasly onto the podium was against the principles of sporting fairness, especially as he was the only one able to benefit from the Right to Review with evidence that was only a “best estimate”.
“The Court concludes that once the Official Timekeeper has established and adopted the distance parameter used by the OTS [Official Timing System] for a Competition, and competitors have been required to calibrate their cars and conduct the Competition by reference to that common parameter, sporting fairness and equal treatment require that the parameter remains fixed for the Competition,” the ICA held.
“What sporting fairness absolutely precludes is the retrospective replacement, after competitors have calibrated and competed against it, of the common event-wide calibration parameter itself by a different geometric or measurement approach for the purpose of re-adjudicating an individual competitor’s result.”
On this basis, despite Gasly not having exceeded the 60kmph speed limit ‘physically’, the Frenchman was still liable to be penalised, more so when all the teams, including Alpine, had had the Friday practice sessions to calibrate not only their pit limiters but also their “driving approach”.
“The Parties also agree on the fact that the FIA delegated the official timekeeping function to FOM and that FOM is responsible for the setup and implementation of the so-called “Official Timing System”, which has been in place since 1996,” the ICA explained.
“It is also undisputed that the distance parameter itself is not disclosed to competitors. Competitors therefore cannot independently choose which distance parameter to apply.
“They [the teams] receive the OTS outputs, use Free Practice Sessions to calibrate their limiters and driving approach against the system as configured, and conduct the Competition on that basis.
“An OTS reading even 0.1 km/h above the applicable limit may result in an infringement. Such a regime is workable only if the benchmark against which all competitors calibrate is common, stable and applied equally throughout the Competition.”
Accordingly, Gasly’s penalties have been reimposed, and Hadjar resumes his previous P3 classification.
Reading the ICA’s verdict in isolation does clarify the governing body’s stand. The tribunal expressly held that the timing system was not immune from scrutiny, but even so, the errors identified could not be used to annul a race classification where all the competitors had participated on the basis of that ‘flawed’ system. What the FOM can do is to “improve” the system for future Grands Prix.
Alpine to decide “what to do next”
After the verdict, Alpine released a statement expressing its “frustrations” with the decision that the Anglo-French marque believes has “unjustly punished” them.
Gasly was miffed, too. Speaking to the media, he said, “We got robbed. I think this isn’t going to end there.”
Why? Alpine de facto Team Principal Flavio Briatore’s press conference, alongside Fred Vasseur and McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella, holds the answer.
Briatore, in an explosive tirade, levelled accusations of bias towards one of the presiding judges.
“What is very strange was the fourth judge on the panel, and one of the judges acted like a prosecutor,” he said.
“For this, [it’s] not a big problem. The problem is, it’s very linked with the McLaren company, because we have a nice picture of this guy at the speech for McLaren in 2018 in MSO Beverly Hills.
“He made a foundation, it’s called One Drop Foundation. And McLaren gave [it] two or three McLaren cars. And I think this was quite unfair [that] one of the judges was linked with a team protesting us.
“What is unfair is some judge was linked with the McLaren. This is unfair [because] the judge normally [has to] be independent completely and this judge – the name is kind of Italian name – is American, Filippo Marchino, was very nasty during the hearing,” Briatore continued.
“[He] was acting as a prosecutor and after we come down to… what is the reason why [he was] so nasty? He’s very linked with McLaren.”
The fiery Italian also hinted that the Enstone-based team would not take the decision lying down, explaining Gasly’s optimism.
“I think so the panel needs to be completely independent, and you don’t need somebody linked with some team, especially the team involved with us in this situation. Now we think about what we do next,” Briatore added.
If “this isn’t going to end here” then where will it?
First things first, as a lawyer myself, who has had the opportunity to study the FIA’s statutes with some careful consideration, Alpine really has no tangible chance to overturn the ICA’s decision – at least on merit.
Sports law jurisprudence would show that if the Enstone-based team wants to challenge the verdict purely on the merits of the decision, the only available avenue is to lodge an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
That said, an appeal route to CAS is actually not available to Alpine owing to the strict jurisdictional bar imposed by the FIA.
Article 17 of the FIA Judicial and Disciplinary Rules states that “nothing in these rules shall prevent any party from pursuing any right of action which it may have before any court or tribunal,” subject to the party having first exhausted all the mechanisms available under the FIA statutes.
But the FIA not “preventing” a party from approaching CAS is completely different from the FIA “allowing” it.
In other words, the FIA makes it abundantly clear that the statutes do not prohibit any party from pursuing an alternative legal remedy, however, in the same breath, it explicitly does not create an inherent right to pursue them before CAS.
This has been decided, with finality, in the matter of Sheikh Khalid Al Qassimi & Abu Dhabi Racing Team v. FIA, QMMF & Al-Attiyah.
The CAS panel, while dismissing the said Appeal, had categorically held that the panel itself has no jurisdiction whatsoever to entertain any disputes settled before the ICA.
“To say that there can be no interference with a right is self-evidently not the same thing as establishing that the right exists in the first place. The Rules would allow the Appellants an option to go to either a court or to an arbitral tribunal, but only provided its right to do so exists (the words are “which it may have”, not “which it is hereby granted”).”
So, purely from a sporting perspective, Alpine are bound by the decision of the ICA. But this is where Briatore’s allegations give the Anglo-French marque a fighting chance, albeit a very nuanced and slim one at that.
What Alpine cannot expect is the French civil courts to determine the sporting merits of the decision, that would be a far stretch, but what it can do is invalidate the veracity of the decision on the grounds of institutional bias, and an obliteration of the principles of natural justice as it were.
Briatore’s allegations, if true, vitiate the very heart of the verdict, and ironically the basis on which it has been rendered; fairness.
The FIA statutes devolve a responsibility of independence and impartiality on the judges presiding over the International Tribunal (the FIA’s court of the first instance), the Cost-Cap Adjudication Panel and the ICA.
“The Judges shall undertake to act with full independence and impartiality so as to preserve the independence of the Courts,” Article 1.4 of the Judicial and Disciplinary rules of the FIA mandate.
“Each Judge must be and remain independent of the FIA and of the parties involved. Any member of the Courts involved in a particular case must disclose immediately any circumstance which might reasonably be regarded as potentially compromising his independence.”
The duty of disclosure, however, is immensely open-ended. Should the disclosure be made to the FIA President, the President of the panel, the parties, or to them all? What should be the form of such disclosure?
But where Alpine’s challenge will really be evaluated is under Article 1.5.
“A Judge shall immediately recuse himself from participating in a case which involves any party or lawyer who belongs to any company, association, law firm or chambers or any kind of entity to which he belongs or in which he takes part in any capacity whatsoever.”
If Alpine were to go before the French civil courts, it must prove that the judge in question is related to McLaren in a very tangible way – at least as per the FIA statutes.
Therefore, Alpine are standing on very thin ground. But Briatore himself is no stranger to overturning FIA verdicts on grounds of institutional bias.
The Italian had approached the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris against the FIA’s lifetime ban imposed on him in the wake of the ‘Crashgate’ scandal.
The court overturned this ban, citing a conflict of interest, as former FIA President Max Mosley, infamously at loggerheads with Briatore, was a decisive individual in the rendering of the sanction.
“The decision of the World Council was presided over by the FIA president, who was well known to be in conflict with Briatore, with Mr. Mosley having played a leading role in launching the enquiry and its investigation in violation of the principle of separation of the power of the bodies. The decision (of the FIA World Motor Sport Council) is not annulled but declared irregular, and rendered without effect in its provisions against Mr. Briatore and Mr. Symonds,” the court had held.
But even having proved bias, the underlying decision had not been annulled; rather, the irregularity had rendered it without effect. The parties were still held guilty; only Briatore’s ban – not affecting the sporting decision but a disciplinary sanction – had been overturned.
Alpine can place reliance on this; however, it must prove a similar instance of injury inflicted by the alleged bias. If they do so, for Alpine, this could mean only a symbolic victory against the ICA verdict or something more.
But what is to be kept in mind is that courts generally refrain from infringing upon the jurisdiction of sports governing bodies. This would mean that the chances of Alpine securing a reversal of the ICA verdict, i.e., cancellation of the penalties, which would in effect once again reinstate Gasly to the podium, are slim to none.
Notwithstanding, the facts are before Alpine, and in one way or the other this Monaco podium saga must come to an end.
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