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Amidst all this chatter Formula 1 season about McLaren’s Landa Norris challenging Red Bull’s Max Verstappen behind the scenes, another battle for the World Cup began: Formula One drivers against the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, or FIA, the sport’s sanctioning body. That particular battle came to a head in Qatar, where a slew of seemingly outlandish penalties changed the penultimate F1 race. There seems to be something wrong with the FIA.
It might be easy to point the finger at Rui Marquez, the brand new race director appointed by the FIA just two weekends ago in Las Vegas. After all, Marquez had never driven a Formula 1 race until he was given the job following the sacking of former race director Nils Vittich. Marquez’s main experience came from his roles as Formula 2 and Formula 3 race director, but in Qatar, with no successor named, he was left to juggle both his old and new responsibilities.
But it would be short-sighted to blame Marquez; it was not his decision to fire Wittich. No, this problem has much deeper roots, and those roots are buried in the FIA.
The conflict between organizers and F1 drivers and teams is an old story; all the way back to Formula 1’s first race, the 1950 British Grand Prix, Ferrari refused to show up due to disputes over prize money. That tension has only grown as F1’s sanctioning body has been given more powers, but things have seemed particularly out of place in the past few years.
Following Art scandalous final 2021 Abu DhabiFIA president Jean Todt’s reign at the helm of the sanctioning body has come to an end and has been replaced by Mohamed Ben Sulayem. Sulayem, a former driver and representative of Emirati motorsport. Things have gotten a little crazy since then.
Sulayem’s presidency coincided with major changes in the composition of the FIA. Nils Wittich was perhaps the most famous and the most shocking, but the long list of employees who have left the FIA in the last year includes Paolo Basari (Director of Compliance), Steve Nielsen (Sporting Director), Deborah Mayer (Head of the FIA Women’s Commission), Tim Goss (Technical Director Single Seater), Natalie Robin (Chief Executive Officer), Luke Skipper (Communications Director) and Jacob Bangsgaard (General Secretary of Mobility).
Moreover, Sulayem’s arrogant personality and his frankness with the media have seen him in hot water. The archived 2001 comments came shortly after he took over as head of the FIA, in which he was quoted as saying he did not like “women who think they are smarter than men because they are not” – a statement which , the FIA argued, “does not reflect the president’s beliefs.”
This year, Sulayem publicly accused drivers of swearing on the radio, saying they were racers, not “rappers.” The racial coding of the word “rappers” aside, Sulayem’s comments infuriated drivers who asked to be treated like adults; after all, racing is a heated business and drivers are not the type to broadcast radio messages during a race.
Media comments alone do not fully summarize the controversy following Sulaiman’s presidency. One of his first acts as FIA president was to oversee an investigation into the controversial end to the 2021 season in Abu Dhabi, where F1’s safety car protocol was breached to end the race in a one-lap shootout. The investigation concluded that the result could not be changed because there was “no mechanism to change the classification” – ignoring the fact that the FIA president has the option of taking any disputed race results to the FIA’s International Court of Appeal.
In addition, it is alleged that Sulayem ordered the FIA officials to declare the Las Vegas street circuit unfit for racing and tried to interfere with the results of the 2023 Saudi Grand Prix.
Combine this controversial management style with an FIA stretched thin by staff departures and you have something as confusing as the 2024 Qatar Grand Prix.
It started after qualifying when Max Verstappen received an embarrassing one-place penalty that saw him move from pole position to second. In the race itself, we saw the following penalties:
- Lewis Hamilton: Five seconds to go
- Lewis Hamilton: Speeding ticket in pit lane
- George Russell: Five seconds and one penalty point for breaching the safety car rules
- Alex Albon: 10 seconds and two penalty points for a collision with Kevin Magnussen
- Liam Lawson: 10 seconds and two penalty points for a collision with Valtteri Bottas
- Lance Stroll: 10 seconds and two penalty points for a collision with Albon
- Lando Norris: 10-second stop-and-go penalty plus three demerit points for ignoring a yellow flag
The Norris incident is fascinating. The penalty he received effectively killed his race, seeing him drop from second to 10th by the end of the race. But McLaren first expressed serious concern about the yellow flag.
During the race, Alex Albon lost his mirror and that mirror ended up in the middle of the front straight. Race control waved the local yellow, then canceled the yellow before flashing it again. Norris’ yellow flag violation occurred during that period of indecision.
And while the mirror wasn’t technically on the race assembly line, it was still very much in the way – as confirmed once again when Valtteri Bottas’ Sauber destroyed the carbon fiber and glass mechanism while running for the blue flag. Race control yet forgot to call the safety car; it was only after Hamilton and Carlos Sainz blew their tires driving through the wreckage that the race directors finally slowed the pace.
The situation was so chaotic that the FIA was forced to sit down with the race after the conclusion of the Grand Prix to provide an explanation of the penalties.
Regarding the lack of a safety car for the mirror, the FIA said the mirror was a “small amount of rubbish” and that there was no need to issue a safety car for this small piece of rubbish – until Bottas turned the mirror into a carbon fiber minefield. The FIA says it will discuss the situation with the teams.
As for Norris, “the penalty was in accordance with the penalty guidelines distributed to teams” earlier this year and “a double yellow flag violation is considered a serious safety compromise,” hence the penalty.
The FIA also addressed the failure of the safety car’s lights, but it did not address the other 10-second penalties or Verstappen’s one-place penalty.
Teams and drivers will likely continue to ask for explanations, as they did over Verstappen’s double 10-second penalty in Mexico, or Norris’ five-second penalty in Austin, or the chaos of the botched start in Brazil. But answering these questions will require a deep look into the heart of the FIA.
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