Prime Tire Newsletter | This is The Athletic’s F1 newsletter. Sign up here to receive Prime Tire directly in your inbox twice a week during the season and weekly in the offseason.Welcome back to Prime Tire, where today’s newsletter comes to you live from the 2026 Le Mans 24 Hours.I’m sitting in the delightfully old-school media center at the Circuit de la Sarthe and mildly panicking about looking forward to watching an entire 24-hour race to end the week here in France.But, fear not, this edition is still dedicated to Formula 1, with the action for the first Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix (but very much not the first F1 race on this track) getting underway in Spain today.I’m Alex, and Luke Smith will be along later, live from Barcelona.Penalty Puzzle: Part IToday I was expecting to get into why the Barcelona race no longer has the Spanish GP moniker it held between 1991-2025.But there’s only one story in town today: the penalty saga that meant the FIA had to reissue the final race classification and championship points standings (the final sign that an F1 event has concluded) for last Sunday’s Monaco GP. The ruling came down this afternoon in Europe.This was done after a Right of Review hearing was held virtually with the Monaco GP stewards (a different group is officiating in Barcelona, where the F1 teams decamped to this week), having been initiated by Alpine on behalf of Pierre Gasly.The reason for the review? Gasly lost his third-place finish in Monaco in the spate of pit-lane speeding penalties handed out in the event.Let’s throw it to Luke to explain exactly what happened (with a promise to revisit F1’s Spanish GP history in PT in time for the race’s first edition at the Madring track on Sept. 13).Inside the Paddock with Luke Smith: Gasly gets points back, but not the momentWhen Gasly came to speak with me and a handful of other reporters post-race in Monaco, he seemed broken.He took a good 20 seconds staring downward before finding the words to sum up his heartbreak, after two pit-lane speeding penalties denied him the chance of standing on the Monaco podium for the first time in his F1 career.Fast forward five days, and that despair was replaced with joy, after the FIA stewards overturned his penalties following a Right of Review process. It was found that Gasly didn’t speed in the pit lane after all, due to an error in the measurement of the tightly controlled area.