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Fast cars, lightning reflexes, and the unknown future-- this is Blind Corners. News and chatting about the latest topics around the Formula 1 World Championship. Hosted by Bryce Castillo. Putting the 'theory' in critical racing theory since 2023.
[0:00] Coming up, Alpine are going to lose their right of review, I'm calling it. Plus, shocking new engine development updates, a debriefing from the chaotic Monaco Grand Prix, and a team that's about to cross $1 billion. I'm Blind Bryce Castillo, and this is Blind Corners. Let's start with a story that won't go away from Monaco, Pierre Gasly's double pit lane speeding penalty. Gasly said he was 200% sure that he did not exceed the pit lane speed limit on either occasion. Quote, I know I haven't done anything wrong. Alpine have requested a right of review hearing with the FIA that is scheduled for tomorrow as we're recording this. So the answer might already be out here. Because he was pinged twice for pit lane speeding during the race. He was one of five drivers that got penalized. Initially, he was only 0.1 kilometer per hour over. And then the second time he was considered 0.4 kilometers per hour over. The penalties cost him that likely podium finish to the point where on the radio at the end, he's excited about P3, he's shaking his arm, he's throwing his arms around like at most of that cool-down lap. And Alpine's executive consultant, Flavio Briatore, says that the team strongly disagrees with the penalties, arguing that because at least four teams were affected, it makes a strong case for review, which is fucking false. That's not how that works, and he's been in F1 for long enough to know.
[1:29] First, look at the history of the right of review in F1. The odds are super stacked against you regardless. Race fans pulled the rights of review since 2019, and there have been 14 requests lodged by teams. And out of those 14, only four of them succeeded. In fact, the only real success stories here are like procedural wins. Haas protesting Alonso too late in Austin 2022, or Aston Martin getting Alonso's Saudi Arabia penalty overturned in 2023. That's when he was going into the pit for a penalty and the front jack touched his car. The stewards decided that that's happened in the past and in the past, that does not count as working on the car.
[2:08] Even more than on the odds, it's not even going to pass on merit. The measuring setup for the pit lane is pretty standard across top-level racing series and the rules around timing were written almost explicitly to make it so that the common sense appeal that Alpine are going for will not work.
[2:26] Yes, the pit lane does have a speed limit, but the rules are explicit that that is not what they measure. It measures the time in the fast lane between these mini sector-like calculations. The onboard speed data is not used for this. It is not reliable. It could be exploited. It could malfunction. And frankly, even if Alpine did have some sort of magic third-party speed data, it really wouldn't matter because the rules are not about speed, unfortunately. So then how do they measure the pit lane speed? So there are timing loops. They're like cables or something embedded into the surface of F1 pit lanes. These measure when the car's first wheel or the transponder passes each of those timing loops, and it calculates the time between those timing loops and comes up with a speed, because they know the distance between those timing loops. This is a highly accurate system, more so than speed guns. The problem wasn't with the system at Monaco. The FIA even said that there were no irregularities with the system.
[3:23] The problem was geometry. See, the drivers are allowed to cross the white line at the ends of the pit straight. But that doesn't change where the timing lines are. So when you cross that line, you shorten the distance between those two lines, and then you've raised your average speed. Because even though you were still going from point A to point B, you have made point A to point B even shorter. In another perspective, it's not a speeding penalty, it's like a corner-cutting penalty. And the stewards made it abundantly clear to the drivers before the weekend that cutting the pit lane was going to be somewhere where you would be vulnerable. So I'm recording this on Wednesday. The hearing will be tomorrow, but I expect that it will be a pretty quick denial. I think that they will lose the right of appeal. And I'm happy to eat crow. I'll eat all the crow.
[4:10] As a follow-up from what we talked about last week, Formula One has finally agreed on their major revisions for the 2026 and the 2027 and the 2028 power unit regs. The FIA, Formula One, and teams have signed off on a staged rebalancing of the internal combustion engine and energy recovery split. Right now, that energy split is about 53% from the internal combustion engine, about 47% from ERS or from the battery. For 2027, they're going to move that to a 58-42 split, and then by 2028, it will be 60-40 in favor of the combustion. But how are they going to get there? Next year, the maximum ice power will jump from 400 kilowatts to 420 kilowatts.
[4:52] That's because they're going to up the fuel flow rate by about 5%. And then in 2028, that 420 is going to go up to 450 kilowatts with a 13% fuel flow increase. So more fuel for the engines going at a higher caliber of speed. Overtake mode will still be the same at 350 kilowatts, but the teams will be able to harvest more power, 375 kilowatts next year and 400 in 2028. The rules will need to be approved by the World Motorsport Council, which will vote on June 23rd. This seems like the conclusion to what we talked about last week, though I kind of didn't expect them to say that they were going to push it to two-year increments. And I don't want to damn this news before it actually comes to fruition, but at the end of 2028, the start of 2029, are they going to freeze the engine formula?
[5:43] Is this even going to work, and will they need to keep changing the engine formula? Because at that point, we'll be one or two years, presumably, away from Formula One moving to V8s, which is certainly what they've been saying. Ultimately, I'm glad that they're trying to fix this. This is the thing I've been talking about. I want them to fix it. They've got a plan to try to fix it. And it's only going to start in about nine months, and it's going to take about two years to do it. But we've got a plan, I guess.
[6:10] Speaking of the power units, the first ADUO rankings of the 2026 season are in, and the result is turning heads. Most people would say that Mercedes has the benchmark power unit right now. They are dominating the championship every race so far, but that doesn't seem to matter too much for the ADUO system. So ADUO, the Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities system, is designed to give struggling manufacturers a chance to catch up. And in an incredibly short letter that the FIA sent out, they have claimed that the Red Bull Ford engine is the benchmark engine, the best engine of the five. Which feels crazy because at the moment, Red Bull is like with the third or fourth best team. It would be about third if you were just ranking the engine manufacturers. But while Mercedes have a really strong total package, the ADUO system is only measuring power related to the ICE engine, nothing around the MGU-K battery system.
[7:05] I think it's because, like, the battery doesn't, like, generate anything. It's all the engine ultimately generating the power. And the brakes, I guess. So what does that mean in practical terms? Red Bull will get nothing! Nothing at all. They're not going to get upgrade tokens. They're not going to get extra cost cap. They're not going to get extra dino time. Meanwhile, Mercedes, who was judged to be about 2-4% adrift, they're going to get an extra homologation for this year and one in 2027. Plus, they get $3 million added to their cast cop and 70 extra hours for bench testing. Ferrari, Audi, and Honda have been judged to be more than 4% off, and they're going to get two upgrades each year. And the twist of the knife is that this could doubly benefit Mercedes. They have extra resources now, extra bench time to take their engine, which is already incredibly dominant.
[7:57] And they can choose when to upgrade their engine. They can hold back for, I guess, as long as they want. I guess they have to put the upgrade in the calendar year. But they can choose when to deploy it. And their engine, their whole package is really good. In fact, if Mercedes end up holding off the upgrade to their engine, presumably that would mean that Mercedes will stay where they are in the Adduo ranking and then potentially get more ADUO upgrades. And so even though Ferrari and Audi and Honda are also going to get upgrades, twice the upgrades of Mercedes, because Mercedes is such a dominant position right now, could probably delay their engine and not have any trouble. They don't have any trouble with the car right now.
[8:37] And the longer that they hold that off, that means it's going to be tougher for the other teams to gauge how much improvement they need to make to catch up. The ADUO system is i think a good system on paper but it obviously runs into a lot of issues this year where the engines are already a source of trouble the whole formula is a source of trouble and we talked about it a little bit last week and we kind of don't have a sense of what this looks like just yet but there are ADUO upgrades but then also the allowed upgrades for 27 and 28 to the engines.
[9:11] Where do those fit in? Like if Red Bull have the benchmark engine right now and let's say they end the season with it, does that mean, what does it look like for them to upgrade their engine? Are they only allowed to upgrade it in the sense of affecting the fuel flow rate? I don't know. Well, we'll have to see. I don't know. I don't know that one. Sorry. I'm asking, I'm asking questions. Time for a debrief of the Monaco Grand Prix. It was very dramatic in Monaco. First up, Kimi Antonelli winning from pole position. He led every lap, he set the fastest lap, and he took the win. That is a Grand Slam that makes him the 28th driver in F1 history to do so. And doing it at 19 years and 286 days old, he is the youngest ever Grand Slam winner by about four years. On top of all the speeding penalties that we talked about earlier, George Russell obviously had a really bad stop. The cars were driving through the pit lane because of one of the crashes. And George inadvertently went into the pit box and the pit team, the pit crew, were not ready to make a stop for him. And because they weren't ready or expecting him to make the stop, they even tried to tell him on the radio to stay out. But I guess they weren't able to get it in time. Because that was all in such a rush, the team just sounds like the team forgot to make him serve that five second penalty. Mercedes even gave a funny little statement that was just, yeah, we weren't ready. We didn't know it was happening.
[10:38] It was also not a great weekend for McLaren, who were celebrating their 1000th Grand Prix. Andrea Stella actually mentioned something this week that the current rules have made it harder for, let's say McLaren or any of the customer teams. I don't think that this is new news. It's just that it's new-ish because we just spent the last however many years inside of an engine freeze because the engines were frozen it gave customer teams a good chance to work on integrating those engines and it ultimately led to mclaren getting their titles and because the engines are in like very active development mclaren are just like inherently on the back foot supposedly they have some say in how mercedes, works on the engines but ultimately it's mercedes making the engines and mercedes have a car so they're just going to have the closest.
[11:27] Integration between those two. There was also some hard news out of Monaco. Cadillac was looking to get their first points finish, But then they didn't. It looked like Sergio Perez, and he was out of the box on the restart, which wasn't positioned correctly. And so he ended up getting a 10-second penalty, which ruined that point. It could have been huge. This has been a season of giving Cadillac more than the benefit of the doubt. Everyone knows that last place is kind of the best that they can hope for right now. But it's real hard luck, because Valtteri and Sergio are great drivers. And the Cadillac team is, like, punching above its weight, understanding that its weight is still very low. And, of course, that ended up giving Fernando Alonso the final point in the Monaco GP. And then some evolving drama, that final quarter of the race where Lance Stroll and Charles Leclerc crashed into the same wall, almost back-to-back, basically. It turns out that the streets of Monaco had been resurfaced recently.
[12:30] And there were even like social media photos showing race officials that were patching up that part of the track before the race. So there's speculation that maybe the track just wasn't good, maybe it didn't fully cure, maybe it didn't fully set. From the onboards, you could see that Lance's wheels had picked up some of the marbles from like loose tarmac. But Lance and Charles both ultimately blamed their braking systems for the crash. Charles even mentioned that he was going to change his brake discs from Brembo to Carbon Industries, and this would be matching a change Lewis Hamilton recently did. And this was so damning that Brembo even had to put out a PR statement saying that, like, Charles was quick to blame, and that Brembo makes quality brakes, and we have to look at the data, and it's way too fast to come up with those conclusions, you fucking car jockey. They didn't say that last part. I said that last part. That's all the news that mattered in Monaco. If anything else happened, I don't remember it.
[13:24] And finally, some quick news to round out the week. It's a busy week. Renault officially halted the negotiations regarding the sale of co-owner Otro Capital's 24% stake in the Alpine F1 team. CEO Francois Provost confirmed the decision, citing dissatisfaction with the progress and the nature of the discussions that Otro was having. This basically ends the idea that someone could buy a stake in Alpine, including Christian Horner, who was talking about trying it. Mercedes is on track to be the first F1 team to reach a billion dollars in revenue. This is potentially achievable by the end of the year. The 2025 accounting reported revenue of 633 million pounds, about 846 million dollars, driven by lots of sponsorships and licensing. That growth was marginal compared to 2024, but the team expects a big boost in prize money following winning five fucking races in a row. They also increased operating profits to 166 million pounds, aided by reduced driver wage costs and new high-profile partnerships like Microsoft and Adidas.
[14:28] Lewis Hamilton apparently must have been that expensive. While Mercedes has not hit a billion dollars just yet, it seems possible that they could make it by the end of the year. And finally, the FIA stewards have fined McLaren €25,900 for taping over the neutral button on Lando Norris' car. We talked about this for the Miami GP or the Canadian GP, where Liam Lawson crashed out and then the Marshalls couldn't hit the neutral button on the outside of the car. And basically the exact same thing happened when Lando Norris crashed out. That clutch disengagement system had been taped over for marginal aerodynamic gains. The taping over it was such that it actually takes a tool to undo that tape. I mean, I guess a blade would work, but no one's going to fucking slash an F1 car. And because that tape needed a tool, the marshals had to physically lift the car to move it. The stewards issued a harsher penalty to McLaren than the previous similar case for Racing Bulls, citing that the teens should already have been aware of the critical importance of the system. They're getting punished for being the second ones to do this. They will pay two-thirds of the fine immediately, and the rest will be suspended for 12 months.
[15:39] So that's your catch-up ahead of the Barcelona Grand Prix this weekend. It'll be interesting to see what happens. Monaco couldn't really tell us much other than that Ferrari was not as good as they thought they were going to be. Thank you so much for listening. If you've been enjoying this, go to Patreon, patreon.com.lfgx, where you can support this and all sorts of other stuff like Marbles. Marbles is coming back. Check out the website marbles.win. Thursday's here this summer. Check it out. And we'll be back after this Barcelona Grand Prix. I've been "Blind" Bryce Castillo, and this is Blind Corners. NYEOW.