Mercedes explain pit stop error which led to Russell’s costly Monaco Grand Prix penalty

Mercedes have explained why they failed to ensure George Russell served his pit lane speeding penalty in the Monaco Grand Prix, which led to his point-less finish in the race.

Russell was given a five-second time penalty for exceeding the pit lane speed penalty when Mercedes first changed his tyres during the race. He then made a second pit stop, during the first Safety Car period, but his pit crew failed to observe the time penalty before changing his tyres.

Mercedes’ head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin said the situation was complicated by the fact their other car was leading the race, had just lapped Russell and narrowly missed the opportunity to pit when the Safety Car was initially deployed. The team initially decided to pit Andrea Kimi Antonelli but leave Russell out, but that was further complicated when the field was told to pass through the pit lane.

“It was at a very complicated point of the race because Kimi had just overtaken George, so George was a lapped car” said Shovlin in a video released by Mercedes. “When the safety car came out the plan was to bring Kimi in.

“We were just doing the calculations and working out [for] George, with his pit stop, with the penalty and now the added fact that he had to wait for Kimi’s car to be serviced, whether he would still be ahead of Hadjar. We concluded he would not, so we told George to stay out.

“Having missed Kimi’s stop the first time we still had an opportunity the second time around, so we called him in. At that point the message came up that the Safety Car would go through the pit lane.

“So Kimi was being serviced as planned. What we failed to do was get the message to George to stay in the fast lane.

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“Both sets of tyres were there, that’s normal, you do that in a Safety Car because your plans can change depending on what the other teams do. Although we told George to stay out, when they came through the pit lane, he saw his tyres, we didn’t have time to get a message to him to stay in the fast lane, and because he assumed that they were for him, he pulled into the box.

“Because the mechanics weren’t expecting him, they weren’t ready to serve the penalty. So certainly things there that we can learn from and improve in future.”

Following the mistake, Russell repeatedly urged the team to give him another pit stop so he could serve the overlooked five-second time penalty. The team decided not to.

Russell was one of five drivers who incurred penalties for speeding in the pit lane, all by the narrow margin of 0.1kph. Alpine, whose driver Pierre Gasly incurred two penalties, have brought a Right of Review request over the decision.

Shovlin said Mercedes were unclear why Russell triggered the speeding penalty in the first place.

“The way that they calculate pit lane speeds is from [timing] loops in the track. It knows the distance between those loops and it measures the time. From that, it can calculate how fast the car is travelling.

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“In Monaco, the pit lane has some bends in it and the natural tendency of the drivers is to try and go tight to the apex of those bends and shorten the distance. We were well aware of that, we’d already reduced the pit lane speed limiter setting on the car and what we actually did was got George to stay wide of that so he wasn’t cutting the corner.

“So we don’t fully understand why it triggered a pit lane speeding penalty and we’re aware of a few other teams who had a similar issue where they’re not quite sure why it had caused the problem. So there’s discussions going on at the moment. We need to get to the bottom of that because it was clearly very costly for George’s race.”

2026 Monaco Grand Prix

• FIA to hear Alpine’s review request over Gasly’s penalties on Thursday
• Mercedes explain pit stop error which led to Russell’s costly Monaco Grand Prix penalty
• Hamilton feels he is “having to remind people of who I am” after third podium of 2026
• Leclerc called for extra pit stop shortly before crashing out of Monaco GP
• “Undershoot!”: Alpine repeatedly warned Gasly not to break speed limit again

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