Alpine appeal Colapinto Mexico Grand Prix penalty, Digi Mart USA News (Mexico): Alpine will seek to overturn the penalty given to Franco Colapinto at the Formula 1 Mexico Grand Prix, where a ten-second penalty dropped him from eighth to fifteenth place and cost him the four points he had earned on track.
According to Cadena 3, the French team is preparing a submission to the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) requesting a review of the stewards’ decision. The stewards punished the Argentine driver for not reducing his speed sufficiently during a yellow flag period.
The team’s strategy will be to invoke the Right of Review, a regulatory mechanism that allows a case to be reopened when relevant evidence becomes available that was not available when the penalty was decided. Alpine intends to show that Colapinto acted within the parameters set by the regulations.
To support its claim, Alpine will look to present telemetry, images and other technical data related to the car’s behavior. One central point of the dispute is that the stewards considered the driver’s speed reduction insufficient, but did not publicly specify what reduction would have been required to avoid the penalty.
The incident occurred after a collision between Oscar Piastri of McLaren and George Russell of Mercedes. Colapinto was one of the first drivers to pass through the affected sector, a circumstance that may also form part of Alpine’s arguments.
The team has a recent precedent that could help it win a reopening of the case. At this year’s Monaco Grand Prix, Pierre Gasly received two five-second penalties for alleged speeding in the pit lane, which initially cost him third place.
Alpine submitted new technical evidence, and the stewards annulled the penalties and provisionally returned the podium to the Frenchman.
However, after an appeal by McLaren and Red Bull, the FIA International Court of Appeal overturned that decision in September, and Gasly was again relegated to seventh place. Although that precedent did not ultimately favor Alpine, it shows that a regulatory route exists to review penalties after a race has finished.
Now the team will try to use the same procedure to help Colapinto recover the points lost in Mexico, though it must first persuade the FIA to accept the new evidence and reopen the case.
