What are Tim Mayer’s chances of winning the FIA presidency?

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Tim Mayer’s manifesto as an FIA presidential candidate is how closely it echoes that of the incumbent, Mohammed Ben Sulayem, four years ago.

Mayer tacitly admitted as much when he set out his stall at a press conference ahead of the British Grand Prix last weekend.

“Mohammed Ben Sulayem ran on good ideas: value for smaller clubs, transparency, reform,” said Mayer. “The message was right, the delivery has failed. Instead of reform, we’ve seen performance.”

Mayer’s contention is that Ben Sulayem’s regime has relied on “stagecraft” to provide “the illusion of progress”, even describing the federation’s financial turnaround – one of the current president’s most prized talking points – as illusory. That latter point is one for the forensic accountants to preside upon.

But if these two candidates have something of a yin-and-yang relationship, it’s perhaps not a proportional one. The FIA presidential election mechanism is fundamentally a game of numbers, and Ben Sulayem has always ensured the maths work in his favour.

The opening act of the game is for a candidate to demonstrate a global support base via their team (known as the ‘list’) of other FIA members who must support them exclusively: a potential president of the senate, a deputy president and seven vice-presidents for sport, and a deputy president for automobile, mobility and tourism. Of the vice-presidents, there must be two from Europe and one each from Africa, Asia-Pacific, North America, South America, and the Middle-East and North Africa regions.

As such, an incumbent can effectively block opposition by securing the total support of one region: support of just one region – when David Ward abandoned his challenge to Jean Todt in 2013, it was because 11 of the 12 North American auto clubs had already declared themselves for Todt.

Assuming the prerequisites are achieved, candidates need to win numbers in the election itself. The FIA has 245 member organisations across 149 countries; each country gets 24 votes, though these are split between the mobility clubs and sporting clubs. Since the mix of these is different across various territories, some countries carry more weight than others.

It has become abundantly clear that Carlos Sainz Sr’s putative candidacy was never serious, and that he was acting as a so-called ‘stalking horse’, a political term derived from the old hunting practice of using an animal as cover to approach prey undetected.

Students of politics may remember the dog days of the late Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in the UK, when an obscure back-bench MP, 69-year-old Anthony Meyer, ran against the prime minister in a leadership election in late 1989. As expected, he lost – but enough party members voted for Meyer or abstained for opposition to Thatcher to coalesce and gain momentum. Less than a year later, she was out.

One could read developments in this FIA presidential election year similarly. In announcing he was considering a run for the post, Sainz acted as a barometer for the level of opposition to the present regime. He also forced the incumbent president to show at least some of his hand, in the form of a support letter from a significant number of national motoring clubs – predominantly, you’ll observe, Spanish-speaking.

For his part, Mayer says there is no connection between his bid and Sainz’s abortive one.

But in declaring that he will run and outlining a manifesto, rather than just saying he is thinking about it, Mayer has only taken one public step further than Sainz. What he must do next is produce his ‘list’ and then jump through the latest hoops voted through by the FIA general assembly this summer, a vetting process examining “professional integrity”.

Mayer has yet to name any others running on his ticket, though there has been talk of Robert Reid, the former rally co-driver who resigned as Ben Sulayem’s deputy president for sport on the eve of this year’s Bahrain GP. Motorsport UK chairman David Richards, a prominent supporter of Ben Sulayem who has become one of the president’s fiercest critics, was also mentioned during Mayer’s press conference as an advisory figure.

“I’m very privileged to have some very high-level advice on what we need to do,” said Mayer.

Tim Mayer

Photo by: Clive Mason/Getty Images

“The presidential list… there are some vacancies still in that. We’ve been trying to keep this campaign below the radar. We’ve had to do that.

“There’s no secret in motorsport or mobility, so if we’re talking to people it wouldn’t be a secret.”

Mayer also cited former FIA CEO Natalie Robyn, who left in 2024 after a very brief tenure, saying he would “have her back tomorrow”.

So far, Mayer has provided an eminently quotable focus for anti-Ben Sulayem sentiment, even describing the president’s regime as a “reign of terror”. An interesting choice of words given that this phrase derives from a violent phase of the French Revolution, and the FIA’s HQ stands in the Place de la Concorde – where King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were parted from their heads in 1793.

But to succeed in the fundamental numbers game, Mayer will have to do more than just lob barbs in the incumbent’s direction.

A key aspect of the FIA which many fail to appreciate is that Formula 1 and motorsport represent only a fraction of the governing body’s business. The member clubs have their own agendas and priorities, so the electioneering process is fundamentally a transactional one: what can or will the president do for them?

This is the key battleground for Mayer, and he knows it.

“We are in a situation where it’s very important for the member clubs that they see the value, that they see that they can get value,” he said.

“To be honest, Mohammed has been quite good at explaining to them what he’s doing for them. But he needs to do it top to bottom, not just here and there for member clubs. It needs to be universal within the organisation.”

What Mayer must do to win the election is convince the clubs that, in his words, “they can get better value than they are getting right now”. It all comes down to mathematics.