Audi is appealing over one point, and it is Tsunoda's whole season
Audi wants the FIA to take a point back from Racing Bulls
Audi finished the Italian Grand Prix 11th with Gabriel Bortoleto, one place and one point outside the top ten. Within an hour of the stewards clearing Yuki Tsunoda of a start-procedure breach, the German manufacturer had notified the FIA that it intends to appeal. The decision it is challenging runs to several hundred words and ends with the stewards asking the FIA to change how race control talks to teams.
Rui Marques ordered an extra formation lap on lap 6 at Monza
The race was restarted on lap 6 after a red flag for Charles Leclerc's crash, and Tsunoda was not sure whether he belonged in 14th or 15th on the grid. He set off for the left-hand side, changed his mind, crossed the track and parked inside his correct 14th box, but pointing at the pit wall. Race director Rui Marques said he was not comfortable starting the race with the car like that and ordered another formation lap. Kimi Antonelli went on to win from 19th; Tsunoda came home tenth.
Article B5.9.4 punishes the pit-lane failure, not the extra lap
The rule Audi is quoting says a driver who causes an extra formation lap must enter the pit lane at the end of it and start from the pit exit. The stewards read it narrowly and said the mandatory stop-and-go exists for failing to come into the pit lane, not for causing the lap in the first place. They then made the point that decides the case: to comply, a driver has to know he was the cause. Race control never sent that message to Racing Bulls, so the team had no reason to call Tsunoda in, and the stewards concluded they were unable to impose the penalty at all.
The stewards asked the FIA to build the warning that does not exist
The verdict closes by noting that Marques acted in good faith and out of caution, and that the FIA might wish to implement a process to tell teams and drivers when they are considered the cause of an extra formation lap. That is the panel saying, in writing, that Article B5.9.4 currently asks for compliance with something nobody is informed about. Racing Bulls had already pointed out that extra laps get called for reasons as random as a photographer standing in the wrong place.
One point takes Audi to 17 and leaves Tsunoda on zero
Audi sits eighth in the constructors' championship on 16 points, five behind Haas and five clear of Williams. Winning the appeal would make it 17 and cut the gap to Haas to four, with ten races left. It would also strip Racing Bulls of a point, from 75 to 74, and take Tsunoda's tally back to nothing. That single point is his entire 2026, scored on his second start since he replaced Liam Lawson at Racing Bulls.
Audi has 96 hours, and they expire on the eve of Madrid
Article 15.4 of the International Sporting Code gives a competitor one hour after a stewards' decision to register an intention to appeal, then 96 hours to decide whether to follow through. Audi used the first window on Sunday evening and says it will not comment further while the process runs. The second expires on Thursday, the day before first practice for the Spanish Grand Prix in Madrid. If it goes ahead, the case lands at the same court that took 89 days to settle the Monaco podium.
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Audi should lose this, and the reason is in the wording rather than the evidence. The stewards did not find that Tsunoda was blameless. They found that Article B5.9.4 sets no penalty for causing an extra formation lap, only for skipping the pit lane afterwards, and that a driver cannot skip an instruction he was never given. To overturn that, the International Court of Appeal has to read a punishment into a clause that does not contain one. Courts are usually worse at that than at reweighing facts.
What makes this worth Audi's lawyers is the same thing that made Monaco worth Alpine's. Both cases turn on the FIA's own information: in Monte Carlo two timing loops were 77 centimetres apart from where the system thought they were, and drivers were punished on numbers that could not be trusted; at Monza the message that would have triggered a penalty was simply never sent, and nobody was punished at all. Same season, same federation, opposite outcomes, and in both the sporting result was decided by a filing cabinet. The fix the stewards asked for costs the FIA one new race control message. If it is not in the system by the 2027 opener, this argument gets to run again.
