Determined to eliminate bad language, FIA president, Mohammed ben Sulayem has warned that team radios could be shut off.
As Max Noble points out in his latest excellent article, Invasion of the Money Snatchers, there is much wrong with F1 and the direction in which it is heading. However, ask the majority of fans – new and old-time purists – and few would claim that swearing is high on the list.
However, as he increasingly exerts his power over the sport, the FIA president is determined to drive it out.
Having uttered naughty words, Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc were immediately penalised, and as the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association seemingly bristles in anticipation of a showdown, Ben Sulayem is ramping up the odds.
Speaking at an FIA officials summit at Jarama, Ben Sulayem warned that in his determination to eradicate bad language – or at least the public being subjected to it – he is prepared to shut down team radio broadcasts.
“Do we go on and then shut down the radios of live communications? Maybe,” he said, in a video published by SoyMotor. “Do we delay it? Maybe,” he added.
“There’s a lot of things we will work on with our promoters. We are still the owners of the championship.”
While McLaren boss, Zak Brown, believes the drivers should not swear during the official press conferences, he appreciates that once in the car and the visor is down emotions will take over.
In that case he feels the broadcasters should step in.
“The swearing I agree with in certain circumstances,” he tells James Allen in his latest podcast. “In a press conference where everything is quite chilled out, there’s no emotion involved, there’s no reason to swear.
“You don’t see Michael Jordan in the NBA, I know I’m dating myself because he’s not played for a while, but you don’t see athletes or managers in press conferences just dropping F-bombs. I think that’s inappropriate and we should set a good example.
“(However, when the helmet is on, you’re in the heat of the battle, I would imagine on a football pitch or a baseball field, there’s a lot of stuff that we just don’t hear because they’re not mic’d up,” he continued.
“We do have the power to hit the delay button or delete on the broadcast. You actually can control whether it makes it onto TV or not by just hitting the delete button.
“I think showing the emotion and the passion and the intensity is good,” he admitted. “A little bit of it is okay, but we’ve got the power in the production studio to hit the pause button. So I think that’s how you solve that. It would be unrealistic to say you can’t swear when the helmet is on.”
On Sunday, F1 released the latest sneak preview of the F1 movie – F1 – which hits theatres in the summer.
Unless the movie is as woke as some of the crap dished up in recent years – all of which has led to a marked fall in the number of cinema goers and financial disaster for the studios – as plots and characters are mis-shaped out of all genuine recognition in order to fit the agenda, the F1 movie will feature lots of emotion, anger and frustration… and as a result… swearing.
If it doesn’t then the movie will be as fake and as ‘new Hollywood’ as we fear, if not are we to assume Brad Pitt will be penalised or Ben Sulayem will have theatres bleep out the offending words.
Meanwhile, following the GPDA’s calls for transparency over where the money raised from fines actually goes, we hear that there is no truth in the rumour that George Russell ghas called on Elon Musk and his DOGE team.
