FIA claims new department will lead to “more professional” officials amid teams unease

The FIA says its new officials department will lead to a “more professional” governing body in the future, amid unease from Formula 1 teams over steward consistency.

Last September the FIA announced it would introduce a new officials department to help the governing body train officials across all its sanctioned motor racing activities.

The department headed by experienced Italian steward Matteo Perini, who was appointed Sport Officials Manager at the FIA, has been commissioned to provide training to the next generation of officials and ensure there is a bigger talent pool for the FIA to work with.

The FIA recognises it doesn’t have as many training race stewards, race directors and other officials as desired, against the backdrop of widespread criticism by F1 teams over the consistency of race stewards decisions in recent years. FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has also caught criticism for his man management at the governing body.

Long-time steward Tim Mayer was removed after a disagreement with the president over his handling of a United States Grand Prix track invasion. Ahead of November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix Ben Sulayem personally dismissed F1 race director Niels Wittich, replacing him with F2 and F3 director Rui Marques. Marques’ expected replacement, the respected Singaporean official Janette Tan, was also sacked at short notice, leaving Marques to handle a much busier schedule at Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

Speaking exclusively to Autosport, FIA’s single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis claimed the body’s new officials department will eventually lead to a “more professional body” in the future rather than predominantly relying on volunteers, which will provide more scope to analyse matters away from race weekends.

Having more dedicated stewards available on a full-time or even part-time basis would mean that there is more time to analyse and evaluate decisions made over the race weekend, or expedite certain procedures like right of review requests.

“It’s probably getting a bit unfair to just rely on people to do it out of their good heart, and that’s what we have now,” Tombazis told Autosport.

“We want to go to a more professional body in the future. That’s not to exclude volunteers, but it’s to have a body that can spend the Monday morning after a race analysing every single decision, making sure it was reached correctly, seeing what could be improved, etc.

“That will be combined with a more powerful remote centre, where more monitoring will take place for range of offences, and all of that will be linked together. That’s the general target.

“Ultimately, [the officials department] will bring up a wider pool of people available to do it, and will provide that they will have more time to spend on analysing everything and so on. Just to be clear, that’s without taking anything away from the group we have now, which is very experienced and has been serving for 20 years.”

Last season McLaren and Red Bull were particularly aggrieved by the handling of some of Lando Norris’ and Max Verstappen’s fraught on-track battles in Austin and Mexico, leading wider calls to professionalise stewarding.

Tombazis claimed analysis by both the FIA and some of the teams, including by Aston Martin, has shown that F1’s stewarding decisions are generally more consistent than suggested, but said the governing body must increase the number of officials in its pool to ensure a steady supply of the next generation of officials.

“There’s already a high-performance steward programme and race director programme, which has been going on for a couple of years,” he explained.

“And there have been around 30 people who’ve been selected from national sporting authorities and sponsored by certain people and helped through the programme from different regions.

“These people move onto the ladder and ultimately could end up in Formula 1 or rallying or Formula E in the future. So, I think that is going on reasonably okay for a number of years.

Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38, battles with Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB20

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images

“That said, there’s also the feeling that it must step even further. It must be a proper department that leads these matters.

“We feel that in Formula 1 we get quite a lot of comments about the consistency of stewards. I would hasten to add that analysis was also done even by teams, that has indicated that the stewards are actually pretty consistent.

“However, they are people who definitely have a huge level of expertise, but we don’t have as many as we would like available or trained up.”

In recent days Ben Sulayem has come under further scrutiny after doubling down on his quest to clamp down on swearing and other sporting code violations.

The FIA released an updated version of its sporting code on Wednesday with new guidelines regarding driver misconduct.

The updated stewards’ penalty guidelines could result in Formula 1 drivers collecting fines of up to 120,000 euro as well as championship points deductions and even suspensions for infractions like swearing and making political or religious statements that violate the FIA’s neutrality principles.

After swearing in press conferences last season world champion Verstappen and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc were fined, with Verstappen also ordered to undertake community service for the FIA in Rwanda.

In response the drivers’ association GPDA published an open letter asking the FIA to treat drivers like adults. The GPDA has yet to respond to this week’s updated stewards guidelines.

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