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Guenther Steiner has described the FIA’s decision to reinstate Pierre Gasly’s Monaco Grand Prix podium as a ‘debacle’, arguing that the ruling has created a serious problem for Formula 1’s regulatory consistency.
Speaking on The Red Flags Podcast, the former Haas team principal delivered a typically blunt assessment of the post-race process that followed Alpine’s successful appeal against Gasly’s pitlane speeding penalty. The sanction had originally dropped the Alpine driver from third to seventh after it was applied to the final classification, as Gasly had not served it during the race.
Alpine then submitted a right of review request. The FIA later restored Gasly to the podium after confirming the team had provided evidence that had not been available to the stewards at the time of the original decision.
The case has quickly become one of the most contentious officiating flashpoints of the season, with wider concern focused not only on Gasly’s result, but on what the ruling means for other penalties issued in the same race. For more on the wider fallout, Martin Brundle has also called the Gasly Monaco situation ‘a mess with no easy solution’.
The central complication is that several other drivers were also penalised for speeding in the pitlane, but served those penalties during the race. Unlike Gasly’s post-race time sanction, those penalties cannot simply be removed from the classification after the fact.
That is the point Steiner believes makes the reinstatement fundamentally flawed.
‘It shouldn't have been reinstated because if you reinstate his podium, you have to change also the other ones, and you cannot do that anymore,’ Steiner said. ‘It was a complete cluster*** Monte Carlo on that part.’*
Steiner linked the issue back to the original confusion around the pitlane speeding line or the information given to teams, but argued that correcting one outcome while leaving others untouched only deepened the sporting inconsistency.
‘It started with having the speeding line in the wrong place or giving the wrong information to the teams,’ he said. ‘But in the end, giving him the podium back obviously is the wrong thing to do because all the other ones have penalties, and they cannot get their penalties undone because you cannot do that.’
Steiner stressed that his criticism was not aimed at Gasly personally. He said he would have liked to see the Frenchman on the podium, but only if the result stood on a clean and consistent application of the rules.
‘You cannot get this one right,’ Steiner said. ‘As much as I would have liked Pierre to be on the podium, he should be on there because it's the right way for him to get on there, not because of something which the rules don't provide.’
His conclusion was uncompromising: ‘The whole thing was a debacle in my opinion.’
He’s a software engineer with a deep passion for Formula 1 and motorsport. He co-founded Formula Live Pulse to make live telemetry and race insights accessible, visual, and easy to follow.
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