The baseline penalty for completing a pass off the circuit is 10 seconds. Leclerc got five.

The reduction came down to how the stewards read the entry speed into Turn 4 on the opening lap. Both Ferraris, the panel ruled, had arrived too fast to make the corner on tarmac. Hamilton, defending on the inside, had to run wide to get round at all. That, in the stewards’ view, mattered.

In their written decision, the stewards said Hamilton on the inside “had to go off track to make the corner” and that Leclerc was “therefore not entitled to claim the corner due to the excessive entry speed”. The baseline, the panel wrote, is 10 seconds, “however in mitigation is the fact that car 44 was also off track on the inside of car 16 and this occurred early in the first lap”.

In plain terms: both drivers had already thrown the corner away before the overtake was finished, and the clash happened on lap one when drivers were still sorting themselves out.

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The incident at Turn 4

Hamilton had held off Leclerc’s first attempt into Turn 1. Leclerc tried again a corner later, going around the outside of his teammate into the long right-hander at Turn 4. Hamilton, committed to the inside, ran wide onto the run-off, while Leclerc went across the grass on the outside and emerged in front.

He kept the position rather than hand it back.

Verstappen: “I find that very strange”

Max Verstappen, who inherited the win from the Ferraris, was the loudest voice against the ruling. The Red Bull driver told Viaplay the sanction did not match precedent.

“Normally, that penalty is 10 seconds, and now suddenly it’s five. I find that very strange too,” Verstappen said.

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The Dutchman had a direct interest in the call. Red Bull used the five-second gap to leapfrog Leclerc in the pits, where the Monegasque had to serve the sanction before his crew could touch the car.

Leclerc concedes the point

Leclerc himself did not dispute that a penalty was coming.

“The penalty was deserved in a way,” he told Formula1.com, explaining that both he and Hamilton had missed the corner and that keeping the place made more sense with Verstappen already closing in.

Verstappen won in Mexico City on Sunday from Hamilton and Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli, with Leclerc fourth on the road once the five seconds were added to his time.

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