The AlphaTauri driver found himself stuck in 19th place on the grid after losing a lap that would have put him through to Q2.
The infraction took place at Turn 5, where officials were using CCTV for surveillance purposes.
Sergio Perez also lost a lap time at the same corner in Q2, but a replay on the world feed suggested he hadn’t fully crossed the white line, prompting the FIA to take a second look.
The Mexican then recovered his time, although he still failed to qualify in Q3.
AlphaTauri opted to switch Gasly to a new power unit and start him from the pit lane, which also allowed the team to experiment with the setup for racing and actually use it as a session of testing.
A charge from last to 12th gave an indication of what the Frenchman could have achieved from a representative starting position.
“Still pretty crazy about it,” he said when asked how the penalty impacted his strategy by Autosport.
“Because from what I’ve seen, in the emails I’ve seen, it’s very debatable whether I was on the right track or not. Similar things happened to Yuki [Tsunoda] and Checo, and from the edges they were clearly on the right track. But anyway, that was it.
“And from our position, starting from the back, I think I was happy to try to understand our package a bit more, because at the moment we know we weren’t showing the performance we should.
“And it’s still not great, but at least there are some good signs of performance.”
Pierre Gasly, Alpha Tauri AT03
Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool
Gasly revealed he previously had a lengthy chat with race directors Niels Wittich and Eduardo Freitas over the issue of track limits, which has been a regular topic at FIA driver briefings and GPDA meetings in recent weeks.
“I spent 40 minutes with Niels and Eduardo this morning trying to chat and find a way to make everyone happier.
“At the moment, they have a lot of work. They don’t make life easy. Clearly in this turn 5 they didn’t have the right tools to control it in the fairest way possible.
“We just talked about the solutions coming up to have a more cohesive way to control it first and make sure it’s going in the right direction.
“They were pretty open, I think, and waiting for feedback. And I will also be coming back to all the riders to see if over the next few weeks we can just try to find a way to provide them with a solution as well to improve it.”
Gasly said Perez was lucky that additional footage emerged that ultimately cleared him, while none showed his offence.
“Yeah they were using CCTV and in my case there was nothing else. Checo had these cards on board. For some reason I had a helmet camera, which didn’t allow any other cameras to check whether I was on the right track or not. I saw the footage, and to me it was debatable.
“To me, either you have the right tools to police in the fairest way, or in this case you shouldn’t. And that’s what we discussed.
“I know that for next year they are already considering different options but unfortunately it was me who paid the consequences of what happened this season.”
