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Welcome back to Prime Tire, where today’s newsletter comes to you live from the 2026 Le Mans 24 Hours.
I’m sitting in the delightfully old-school media center at the Circuit de la Sarthe and mildly panicking about looking forward to watching an entire 24-hour race to end the week here in France.
But, fear not, this edition is still dedicated to Formula 1, with the action for the first Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix (but very much not the first F1 race on this track) getting underway in Spain today.
I’m Alex, and Luke Smith will be along later, live from Barcelona.
Penalty Puzzle: Part I
Today I was expecting to get into why the Barcelona race no longer has the Spanish GP moniker it held between 1991-2025.
But there’s only one story in town today: the penalty saga that meant the FIA had to reissue the final race classification and championship points standings (the final sign that an F1 event has concluded) for last Sunday’s Monaco GP. The ruling came down this afternoon in Europe.
This was done after a Right of Review hearing was held virtually with the Monaco GP stewards (a different group is officiating in Barcelona, where the F1 teams decamped to this week), having been initiated by Alpine on behalf of Pierre Gasly.
The reason for the review? Gasly lost his third-place finish in Monaco in the spate of pit-lane speeding penalties handed out in the event.
Let’s throw it to Luke to explain exactly what happened (with a promise to revisit F1’s Spanish GP history in PT in time for the race’s first edition at the Madring track on Sept. 13).
Inside the Paddock with Luke Smith: Gasly gets points back, but not the moment
When Gasly came to speak with me and a handful of other reporters post-race in Monaco, he seemed broken.
He took a good 20 seconds staring downward before finding the words to sum up his heartbreak, after two pit-lane speeding penalties denied him the chance of standing on the Monaco podium for the first time in his F1 career.
Fast forward five days, and that despair was replaced with joy, after the FIA stewards overturned his penalties following a Right of Review process. It was found that Gasly didn’t speed in the pit lane after all, due to an error in the measurement of the tightly controlled area.
- A 77-cm discrepancy between the declared pre-race distance between two timing loops and the actual distance measured by Alpine post-race as part of its evidence was the backbone to prove Gasly wasn’t speeding.
- This is because F1 pit-lane speeds are calculated as an average over distance. Here, a small yet crucial distance.
Gasly has regained third place, and Alpine has an extra nine points — along with its first top-three F1 result since Gasly and his then-teammate Esteban Ocon finished third and second, respectively, in Brazil in 2024.
But there’s one thing the stewards can’t hand back: the chance for Gasly to stand on the podium in Monaco and revel in such a big achievement.
“If I could trade, I’d have that podium moment over the points,” said Steve Nielsen, Alpine’s managing director. “It’s a shame for Pierre and it’s a shame for the team, but we’ve got as much as we can.
“We’ve got the position and the points, which is nice, but if I could choose, I’d have the podium, that emotion.”
Back to you, Alex.
Penalty Puzzle: Part II
The reason for this newsletter’s tennis-style rally on the same topic is that the matter still isn’t quite settled, even with the FIA sending out those classification and points documents.
Red Bull and McLaren have lodged intentions to appeal the Gasly appeal (which is what Right of Review effectively means in F1 parlance), but this doesn’t mean they will even do so. Madeline Coleman has the story.
As Madeline writes, this is just the first step in F1’s (some would say needlessly) complex appeals process: “Teams only have an hour after a decision is made to lodge an intention to appeal, and then they have 96 hours to decide if they will.
“Mercedes did so after the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix but never filed.”
Therefore, we await the next turn in this saga …
Inside the Paddock with Me, Alex: Magic Le Mans
Penalty confusion is not exclusive in the realm of F1 this week. A similar saga played out at the end of Le Mans qualifying last night here in France, albeit one wrapped up much faster.
At the very end of three qualifying sessions (spread over two evenings), Le Mans pole was claimed by Cadillac Jota driver Jack Aitken by a stunning 0.005-second margin over BMW WRT driver Dries Vanthoor.
That’s a 30cm difference over an 8.4-mile track!
But as Aitken and his teammates in the No. 38 Cadillac were celebrating on the podium, it was revealed that their car lost its best time (and therefore pole) because Aitken was sent into the pit lane too early before the final qualifying session. (This is an F1 rule, too.)
Awkward, but not necessarily a disaster for Cadillac. It still has its No. 12 car starting second and the team hopes key aerodynamic changes to its car design for 2026 mean it will avoid being trapped in traffic and losing time, as was the case when it started from Le Mans pole in 2025.
Even the BMW crew that will now start from pole is refusing to get carried away. Along with Raffaele Marciello, Vanthoor is joined in the No. 15 BMW by ex-F1 driver Kevin Magnussen (one of 16 former grand prix stars entering this race).
I spoke to Magnussen in the paddock this afternoon, and he is expecting the Saturday-Sunday contest to be “red hot, the whole race, for the 24 hours.”
“In the past it was always a great race, but it was settled and you would pretty much know who was going to win unless there was maybe a technical failure on one of the cars,” he said.
Magnussen said this with relish and a smile I felt was so rarely forthcoming from the Dane in his long F1 career (185 races over nine seasons).
He just loves Le Mans — from being excited to stay up late into the night as a 9-year-old here in 2003, the earliest he can remember watching his dad Jan Magnussen (another ex-F1 racer) drive here, to competing alongside his father in the same car in the 2021 edition.
“This race will not settle,” he said.
Elsewhere, two of those 16 ex-F1 drivers in the 2026 Le Mans field are the recently axed Alpine and Williams racers, Jack Doohan and Logan Sergeant.
Sergeant and his teammates will start third in LMP2 (the middle class of the three that race at Le Mans each year, behind the Hypercar class that contains the Cadillac and BMW squads, with the slowest category known as GT3, for cars built around real road cars).
Sergeant and his teammates will start 11th of 35 cars in GT3 (48th out of 62 cars in the entire field).
Anyway, that’s all from me today. I’ll be bleary eyed and tired after Le Mans is in the history books come Sunday, but ready and raring to bring you Tuesday’s PT. (Plus all the rest for the next four weeks or so, with Patrick Iversen moonlighting at the World Cup.)
Barcelona Leaderboard
Two practice sessions took place at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya today. One more follows on Saturday before qualifying, and then 2026’s seventh GP on Sunday (starting an hour before things finally finish at Le Mans).
- In FP1, the beleaguered George Russell led the way for Mercedes, setting a best time of 1:16.363 seconds.
- Russell’s dominant teammate, Kimi Antonelli, handed his Mercedes over to rookie driver Frederik Vesti in FP1. Six other teams made similar swaps, as part of F1’s rules for such inexperienced drivers to replace the regulars in two practice sessions for each car across each season.
- The top rookie in FP1 was McLaren’s Leonardo Fornaroli — in fifth in Lando Norris’ car. Cadillac driver Colton Herta was 21st.
- In FP2, Norris led the way with a best time of 1:15.426 seconds.
- Encouragingly for Russell, he was just 0.009 seconds behind in second, with Antonelli only fifth and not happy so far with his car’s handling. Maybe Vesti didn’t re-adjust the pedals …
Outside the Points
✅ Pirelli will continue to supply F1 with tires until at least the end of the 2028 season.
🇵🇱 Luke interviewed 2025 Le Mans winner and 2008 Canadian GP victor Robert Kubica, covering the Pole’s horrific rally crash in 2011.
🇮🇹 I explained why Ferrari can win at Le Mans but not in F1.
‼️ And the proposed F1 engine changes for 2027 will come after all, spread across two seasons, including 2028. The drivers, including Max Verstappen, hardly gave this news a ringing endorsement in Barcelona on Thursday.
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