FIA's Officials Department: A solution to inconsistent Formula 1 stewarding?

Up to now, every F1 race has a group of stewards that changes from one grand prix to the other, and that has led to inconsistent judging of driver transgressions and on-track incidents with inconsistency in the severity and type of penalties dished out.

What made matters worse is that the stewards are mostly volunteers who are not paid for their services that are limited only to the race weekend, and even when there is payment, it would be a nominal fee that would basically cover expenses at best.

But back in September of 2024, the FIA created the Officials Department that is headed by the governing body's Sport Officials Manager, Matteo Perini, who is in charge of developing and training future stewards, race directors, and race officials, as the current talent pool is quite limited.

The FIA's head of single-seater, Nicolas Tombazis, explained the aim behind creating this new department and the benefits it will provide in the future while crediting the system currently in place and the individuals that operate within it.

He told Motorsport.com: "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.

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

"That will be combined with a more powerful remote center, where more monitoring will take place for a 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 analyzing 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," Tombazis maintained.

However, Tombazis, a former Ferrari engineer, insisted the current stewarding system has been consistent enough based on certain statistics and insisted on the need to improve even more.

He went on: "There's already a high-performance steward programme and race director programme, which has been going on for a couple of years.

"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 pointed out. "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," Tombazis concluded.

The matter of lack of talent within the FIA was highlighted even further when Niels Wittich left his role as F1 race director back in November of 2024 and was replace by Rui Marques, who served as Formula 2 and Formula 3 race director from the 2024 Las Vegas Grand Prix onwards.