New department set up by the FIA aims to professionalise stewarding.
Though this will not meet the call for professional stewards that some drivers and team bosses have called for, it should improve stewarding which has been the subject of criticism for some time.
The new department, which was first announced late last year, comes at a time the sport appears to be heading for a clash with its governing body which at the same time is riven with issues including high profile sackings and departures.
Niels Wittich, one of two race directors introduced in the wake of Michael Masi’s ‘departure’ was fired by Mohammed ben Sulayem, without warning or explanation, ahead of the Las Vegas Grand Prix, while veteran steward Tim Mayer was shown the door after disagreeing with the FIA president over the track invasion at the Circuit of the Americas.
Further chaos ensued when the person (Janette Tan) brought in to replace Rui Marques as race director for F2 and F3, after the Portuguese was called on to replace Wittich, was herself fired before she had even overseen a race weekend.
As the FIA’s single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis, explains, the new department is intended to professionalise stewarding as opposed to the current process where the sport relies heavily on volunteers, who are often compromised in terms of the time they can devote to the sport, a significant issue over complicated, controversial race weekends.
“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,” he told Motorsport.com. “We want to go to a more professional body in the future.
“That’s not to exclude volunteers,” he added, “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 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.”
McLaren boss, Zak Brown expressed his frustration with stewarding on a number of occasions last year, feeling that the various incidents involving Lando Norris and Max Verstappen weren’t handled as they should have been.
“There’s already a high-performance steward programme and race director programme, which has been going on for a couple of years,” said Tombazis. “And there have been around 30 people who’ve been selected from national sporting authorities and sponsored by certain people and helped through the program 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.
“That said, there’s also the feeling that it must step even further,” he admitted. “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 the meantime, the FIA might consider appointing a number of ‘professional’ stewards in the wake of the latest steps taken by Ben Sulayem as he continues to clamp down on the ‘behaviour’ of drivers and team bosses.
