After All That, Fernando Alonso’s 100th Podium Has Officially Been Reinstated

The 2023 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix certainly wasn’t without drama, especially if your name was Fernando Alonso.

Essentially, after yet another sensational race weekend, the Formula 1 veteran and current Aston Martin driver managed to secure a P3 finish behind Red Bull Racing’s Sergio Perez – who recorded yet another race win – and reigning two-time champion Max Verstappen, respectively.

What made the occasion even more significant is that Alonso had effectively become the sixth driver in the elite motorsport’s history to achieve a century of podiums. There was just one problem. Actually… two.

Given he lined up just outside of his grid box, about half a tyre’s width to the left of his starting position in P2 , the FIA handed him a five-second penalty which was to be served at his next pit stop. Not ideal, but workable.

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After the retirement of his Aston Martin teammate Lance Stroll, leading to the deployment of a safety car, Alonso promptly got his penalty out of the way and exhibited enough pace for the aforementioned P3 finish, and that should’ve been that. Right? Wrong.

Following the podium ceremony, the brain trust over at the FIA ruled that one of the pit crew’s rear jack had been touching Alonso’s car during his penalty; slapping another 10 seconds onto the Spaniard’s end time, thereby relegating him to P4 while promoting Mercedes’ George Russell to P3.

“Today is not good for the fans,” Fernando Alonso said of the 2023 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

“When you have 35 laps to apply the penalty and you wait until after the podium, there is something wrong in the system.”

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As you can imagine, billionaire team owner Lawrence Stroll and the rest of Aston Martin F1 wasn’t going to take this lying down. And shortly after an appeal was lodged, the FIA reversed the controversial decision to throw a 10-second spanner into El Plan.

An FIA statement read: “In support of the Petition for Review, the Stewards were shown minutes of the latest SAC meeting and video evidence of 7 different instances where cars were touched by the jack while serving a similar penalty to the one imposed on Car 14 without being penalized.”

“The clear submission by the Team was that the alleged representation of an agreement between the FIA and the teams that touching the car in any way, including with a jack, would constitute ‘working’ on the car for the purposes of Article 54.4 (c) of the Sporting Regulations, was incorrect and therefore the basis of the Stewards’ decision was wrong.”

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“Having reviewed the new evidence, we concluded that there was no clear agreement, as was suggested to the Stewards previously, that could be relied upon to determine that parties had agreed that a jack touching a car would amount to working on the car. In the circumstances, we considered that our original decision to impose a penalty on Car 14 needed to be reversed and we did so accordingly.”

You can check out the governing body’s full document release for yourself here, we won’t bore you with all the details.

Anyway, here are the full results of the 2023 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

2023 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix Results