FIA tackles stewards' consistency and 'natural' track limits

The FIA held its last World Motor Sport Council of the year in Vienna yesterday, and one hot topic discussed at the meeting was how to improve the consistency of Formula 1's stewards' decisions.

F1's stewards have been criticized this season on a number of occasions for handing out severe penalties to drivers for track limit violations or blocking and showing clemency in other instances.

In Mexico last month, Lewis Hamilton escaped punishment for cutting across the grass at Turn 1 while Max Verstappen was later inflicted a penalty for a similar infringement.

The FIA is therefore investigating a process which would induce consistency in the stewards' decisions.

FIA Stewards' chairman Garry Connelly elaborated on what the governing body is currently looking at.

"We went through a lot of rules and looked at how we can work with the FIA to tidy up the wording, enabling us to take quicker decisions," explained Connelly

"We talked a lot about how we can achieve better consistency. We think that more meetings and more reviews of past decisions are necessary, so that we all understand how each panel of stewards is treating a particular situation, especially where it's necessary for the stewards to make a subjective ruling, on a dangerous driving charge for example. That is quite a subjective issue.

"These are obviously decisions that are made collectively but understanding how those decisions can be made more consistent is valuable."

Connelly also dwelled on the subject of track limits, saying the FIA favors circuits which offer "natural penalities" for drivers who exceed limits in order to stop them from gaining an advantage, instead of relying on stewards to penalise them.

"There are now probably only 11 or 12 corners across the whole championship where there is the potential for cutting corners in a very obvious way.

"There are solutions that can be adopted to sort those issues out, such as the solution that has been adopted for Turn One in Monza, where if you do go off there is a natural penalty in that it takes you longer to rejoin than if you had used the circuit.

"That makes it a lot easier for the stewards as the penalty is applied on track. The point we also made is that the rules say a driver can rejoin the track as long as you do it safely and gain no lasting advantage. The word lasting is again very subjective.

"Does it mean lasting for 500m, until the next turn, the next few laps or the whole race? That subjectivity is removed if the circuit is modified or designed to immediately disadvantage a driver if he does go off track."

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