Why were so many caught out for pit-lane speeding at Monaco? F1 Q&A

Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption, George Russell was one of five drivers to be penalised for speeding in the pit lane Mercedes' Kimi Antonelli cruised to his fifth successive win in a chaotic Monaco Grand Prix, which featured crashes and a red flag. Ferrari's Lewis Hamilton finished second and Red Bull's Isack Hadjar completed the podium. Charles Leclerc's race ended early after a crash in the final corner during a restart, as his team-mate Hamilton moved into second in the drivers' championship. BBC F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your latest questions after Monaco. Why were so many cars caught out in the pit lane for speeding at Monaco? Was the software to blame? - John Five drivers were penalised for exceeding the 60km/h pit-lane speeding limit in Monaco on Sunday - Ferrari's Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes' George Russell, McLaren's Oscar Piastri and Alpine's Pierre Gasly and Franco Colapinto. That is an unusually large number, and of itself it implied something odd was going on. That impression only increased when the margins were published. All five drivers exceeded the limit by just 0.1km/h - though Gasly also went 0.4km/h over on one of his two offences. It seems this was caused by a combination of the layout of the pit lane and the way the limit is measured. At both entry and exit, there are white lines defining the fast lane of the pit lane, but there is also room to cut across these a little - and given F1 is all about exploiting fine margins, many drivers were doing so. At the same time, the pit-lane limit is not measured by a speed gun, but by a series of timing loops and the on-car transponders. As speed is a measure of distance divided by time, this opens the door to drivers going over the limit if they can find a way to shorten the distance, even if they were technically on or under the limit at all times. This appears to be what has happened here. Mercedes - for one - had instructed their drivers to go wide on the pit-lane entry to avoid this risk. But Russell obviously managed to trigger the limit anyway. The issue was discussed between the teams and governing body the FIA all weekend. All the drivers were adamant they had not exceeded the limit. As Hamilton put it: "I wasn't speeding. It's just the way the pit lane is. I've done this pit lane for years. "It's not like I came in and didn't press the button or something like that. Pit-lane limiter is on immediately. And I think it's just the line that you take, which is the same line we've all taken for years, where you come in, you kind of cut part of the white line. "I was shocked to hear that I was speeding because I wasn't actually above the speed. "It's all about, I think, the distance and something that we really need to look into because I heard lots of people got that today and they probably weren't really speeding. And having to do a stop-and-go, sort of stop and wait for five, 10 seconds, whatever people got, it destroys you on a track so short as well, your chances. So I'm thankful that it didn't impede me too much." As it happens, Hamilton and Ferrari managed to find a way to negate his penalty around the safety-car period. But Piastri suffered a little in terms of position, Gasly lost a podium place, and Russell saw a potential third place converted to no points at all after Mercedes messed up in his safety-car period pit stop and didn't serve the penalty in the right way. Figure caption, Monaco GP Recap: The Jewel in the Crown Shines! After Alpine requested a right of review for the speeding infractions, can you explain what this is, how it works, and does it only apply to Pierre Gasly's race or could other drivers benefit from this? - Kevin A right of review is essentially a laborious/fancy way of saying an appeal. It's used because certain penalties - such as pit-lane speeding - are not subject to appeal. So teams have to use a different mechanism in the rules if they consider the penalty unfair. A right of review request is successful only in extremely rare circumstances. That's because one of its stipulations is it requires a team to submit to the FIA evidence that was not available at the time the penalty was incurred. There are two complicating factors with that. One is that it's quite rare for there to actually be new evidence. But even if there is something that could be argued to be new evidence, the FIA often finds a way to say that whatever the team puts forward as such is not that at all. Sometimes this is more credible an argument than others. Cynics - and there are plenty of those in F1 - often say that's because the FIA does not like to admit it is wrong. Whatever the reason, it underlines why it's so difficult to win such a case. In this situation, in theory any verdict applies only to Gasly, so even if Alpine won, only his race result would change. But of course that would open the door to other teams to complain about what happened, and their result. Which - those cyn

Why were so many caught out for pit-lane speeding at Monaco? F1 Q&A

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