FIA's Revolution: More Race Directors and Stewards in 2025
Feb.10 - There will be more than a single race director and a bigger pool of potential stewards in Formula 1 this year.
That's the news from controversial FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem, who at an event in Madrid defended the recent turmoil at the sport's governing body as the result of the need to "clean house".
In the specialist Spanish media, he defended the latest outrage about new draconian penalties for driver misconduct like swearing, insisting: "If they can control a F1 car, they can control their words".
Another major controversy occurred at the very end of the 2024 world championship, when race director Niels Wittich was suddenly ousted.
It put a huge amount of pressure on his temporary replacement, Rui Marques, who also had to manage his original race director duties for Formula 3 and Formula 2.
"We need new blood among the officials to sustain the business of motorsport," FIA president Ben Sulayem says.
He revealed that there will be more than just a single race director in 2025.
"We will know in the next few days who that will be and how many will be used," said the 63-year-old. "But there will certainly be new faces and there will be more than one, that's for sure.
"There have been people learning, people working behind the scenes, all the time. You cannot simply throw someone into this great challenge," Ben Sulayem added.
He said he is not particularly interested in what the teams and drivers think of the move.
"The FIA is still the owner of the championship," he insisted. "And then, you know, the teams can complain, the drivers can complain, but they don't want to pay for it.
"It's taken us more than two and a half years to get to what we're achieving now. Do we have the results? We'll know the results when the season starts.
"There are some mistakes, and then the FIA is blamed. But why can't the criticism be productive instead, saying together 'how can we find a solution?'
"I tell you, the solution is in training, and solution is about bringing people in."
Finally, back on the issue of swearing in Formula 1, Ben Sulayem admitted that one idea is simply to "go ahead and switch off the radios" to the broadcasters.
"Or do we delay them (the transmissions)?" he added. "Maybe. There are many things we are working on now with our promoter."
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So Rui Marques mightn't continue as F1's race director into the upcoming season, after all, even among a larger group of race directors.
I wouldn't mind, nor would I mind this planned return to the already tried rotation scheme but with more than two individuals rotated, especially if none of the new ones were obsessive to shorten DRS activation zones for the sake of shortening despite following getting harder season-by-season within stable technical regulations, which consequently benefits absolutely no one.
Finally, broadcasting team radio comms has been a thing since the mid-2000s, so it won't stop anyway, especially as FIA doesn't even have control or say on the world feed coverage matters, so MBS can say whatever he wants, but that's all talk without concrete stance or relevance.
What does he even mean by delaying? Radio comms are already 'delayed' & have been ever since Giancarlo Fisichella's cursing in the 2006 Bahrain GP.
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