F1 Q&A: Gasly’s overturned penalty, Hamilton’s race engineer, Lindblad and Red Bull’s engine

The eighth round of the Formula 1 season will take place this weekend in the stunning setting of the Styrian hills in Austria.

In the last race in Barcelona, ​​Mercedes was defeated in a grand prix for the first time this year and Lewis Hamilton won.

The British pilot’s first grand prix victory for Ferrari, combined with Kimi Antonelli’s retirement late in the race, reduced the point gap at the top of the drivers’ championship to 41 points.

BBC F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your latest questions ahead of Sunday’s Spielberg race.

A retrospective podium for Pierre Gasly. Justice? Or is a can of worms better left unopened? – Clive

Formula 1 has clearly been left in a difficult situation regarding pit lane speeding penalties at the Monaco Grand Prix.

The truth is that five cars were given penalties for speeding on pitlane, even though none of them had exceeded the limit.

The length of the pit lane was measured incorrectly; It was possible to cover a distance of 77 meters less than the authorities initially estimated.

And since the pit lane speed limit was controlled by the time taken to go through a series of timing loops over a given distance, this meant drivers were inadvertently penalized.

This led to a series of events that had a dramatic impact on the race outcome.

George Russell was most affected by what happened next; third place moved up to 12th place, losing 15 points in the process.

However, the results of McLaren’s Oscar Piastri and Red Bull’s Isack Hadjar also changed.

While the results of other drivers are not taken into account, is it justice for Gasly to return to third place at the flag where Alpine lost the flag due to his refusal to serve his penalty during the race?

Should the referees who dealt with Alpine’s right to review during the Barcelona weekend just leave it at that and not ask the very obvious questions that arose afterwards?

From the point of view of natural justice, the answer to both these questions is clearly no; There are some issues that this situation raises that have not been properly addressed.

McLaren and Red Bull took the case to the FIA ​​appeal court. No date has been set yet for this to be heard.

Mercedes abandoned attempts to overhaul the race result after concluding that there was no viable mechanism to get Russell to the point where he could finish and that prolonging it would do no one any good.

As McLaren stated in its notice of intention to appeal: “We believe that this case raises important questions regarding sporting fairness, regulatory consistency and the integrity of the competition.”

The shame is that this could all have been avoided if the FIA ​​and F1 had acted differently before the race.

Teams have warned the FIA ​​that there is a problem waiting to emerge with the pit lane speed limit throughout the Monaco weekend.

Authorities investigated the issue, but their initial conclusion was that the concerns were unfounded. This was clearly a mistake. If this issue had been handled correctly at the time, none of this would have happened.

It is hard not to conclude that the matter must be brought to a full and correct conclusion in terms of sporting justice.

Will Ferrari’s Carlo Santi be Lewis Hamilton’s permanent full-time race engineer, or is his role still considered temporary? -Anthony

The relationship between Lewis Hamilton and new race engineer Carlo Santi started off well.

Santi was initially intended to be a stopgap solution before a new full-time engineer was appointed for Hamilton, but a Ferrari spokesman said: “Carlo and Lewis work quite well together and there are no plans to replace him.”

Hamilton has found a much more satisfying relationship with Santi than he had with Riccardo Adami last year, and has tried to explain this without sounding too negative about his situation in 2025.

In Canada, where his best result with Ferrari at the time was second, Hamilton said Santi was “absolutely fantastic and I really loved working with him.”

At Monaco he went even further, comparing his relationship with Santi to the relationship he had with Peter ‘Bono’ Bonnington at Mercedes for 12 years.

“It’s very, very important for the driver-engineers to work together,” Hamilton said. “Adami and I had a really good relationship last year. He’s a very nice guy. We worked relatively well together.

“Learning to meet the driver’s needs takes time.

“When you’re giving feedback to an engineer, getting them to understand their understanding of cornering stability, all the elements that contribute to the struggles you’re struggling with, you try to define what the problem is, the problem you’re having corner by corner, entry, middle and exit, and break it down into five parts if you like.

“Sometimes coincidences can happen due to the driver-engineer collaboration. Me and Bono got along from the very beginning. There was a good working relationship with Michael (Schumacher). I feel Carlo is like my Italian Bono.”

“He’s a little bit OG. He’s an old guy who lives on the block, and he’s very calm. You can hear him on the radio. That’s the detail we were able to dig into together. Our understanding on the engineer side, that’s a great thing.”