F1 Midweek: Maybe The FIA Should Go Away

It’s becoming clear that the FIA is becoming a liability to Formula 1.

It’s not necessarily the recent run of questionable stewarding or even more suspect calls from race control in the last month. Instead, it’s the internal processes that are changing within the FIA with the leadership decisions that have been made in the past few years.

FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem was elected to his post at the end of 2021. At the time, Jean Todt was concluding his third term as president in an administration so quiet and uncontroversial that it’s just a three-sentence paragraph on his Wikipedia page.

Of course, looking under the surface, there were some questionable decisions in his final term. Namely, a controversial decision in early 2020 to “settle” with Ferrari regarding the team’s 2019 engine infringement.

The settlement has never been made public, which again was between the Todt-led FIA and the team/manufacturer he used to run and was deeply connected to for years.

In 2019, longtime F1 race director Charlie Whiting suddenly and unexpectedly died just a few days before the season. Michael Masi was named his replacement, a decision that saw compounded errors over time and ended in the embarrassment that was the end of the 2021 season.

Ben Sulayem based his candidacy on these in mind and ran as a champion of transparency with an eye towards advancing the Federation and motorsport in general in the future. He won and immediately set to work reforming F1 race control.

The reforms he put into place largely seemed to work. A two-person rotation for the race director role ended after the 2022 Japanese Grand Prix, following a tractor driving onto the track and nearly hitting Sergio Perez in the chaos of a red flag period. But outside of that and what I thought was some very overly cautious calls on rain over the years, it seemed like the reforms were working.

The Brazilian GP from last month also proved to be a mess. But race director Niels Wittich got fired over it, at least according to him (the FIA maintains the split was “amicable”). That seems like a huge overreaction, especially as the season is closing out, and that a new race director could lead to instability and inconsistency on the levels we saw in Qatar this past weekend.

But that was just race control. Ben Sulayem has not been afraid of a microphone during his term, and it seems like his opinions will turn on a dime when he wants them to.

Ben Sulayem once said he was fine if drivers like Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel expressed themselves. Then, once Vettel retired, the very next year, the FIA started cracking down on political statements.

We race for money, you see.

There was also this weird fascination the dude had with underwear and piercings. Remember that? That was in 2022, literally year one on the job was spent in-part on trying to regulate that.

Seb wore his underwear over his race suit in protest against the latest FIA clampdown…#F1 #MiamiGP #Autosport pic.twitter.com/FLEzWqRs5S

— Autosport (@autosport) May 6, 2022

And then there’s the Andretti situation, the one thing I can definitively say Ben Sulayem seemingly got right. But even then, the FIA then bungled the approval process while also pissing off both FOM and the ten existing teams on the grid.

Any 11th team should have joined the grid, as they brought value by just existing, and with F1 as close and as big as it is right now, it was time for expansion, as long as the entry was solid and viable. But it seemed like Sulayem focused specifically on the Andretti bid and no other potential entries.

And then we get to the past couple of weeks. The drivers got together through the GPDA and wrote an open letter that basically asked the FIA to treat them like adults.

Ben Sulayem responded to this by saying how he ran the FIA was “none of their business”, even though they compete in an FIA sanctioned series. Thus, it is literally their business to know how the FIA is run.

Tim Mayer, who had served as a senior steward for 15 years, was fired over text because the president didn’t like that he represented the organizers of the United States Grand Prix in a hearing following that race in October.

As the BBC put it in an interview with Mayer:

“Mayer, who was acting in the appeal in his role as sporting organiser of the three grands prix in the USA, said that his involvement in the appeal initially led to to him being removed from the stewards panel at the Sao Paulo Grand Prix earlier this month, before his firing as a 2025 steward this week.

‘The official reason that will be given is they felt there was a conflict of interest with the FIA as I had led the right of review in my role as organiser,’ Mayer said.

‘But that is not why I was fired. Being an organiser is a role that I have fulfilled, benefiting the FIA, for over 12 years. This isn’t new.

‘In spite of the matter being resolved quietly and amicably, he’s still upset and decided to fire me. After 15 years of volunteering my time as a steward, a decade teaching other stewards and hundreds of hours volunteering in other roles, I got a text from one of his assistants.”

Mayer was also exceedingly blunt in the recent bad language crackdown by the administration.

“His view is that the drivers need to be penalised for swearing – and what has happened since reflects that,’ Mayer said.

“Stewards’ panels are meant to be independent bodies. But Mayer said: ‘There are times when he has directly involved himself in making his views known. Not with the stewards directly, but via his staff.”

Now, here’s the best part of all of this. The best recourse to get rid of a president is to vote them out of office, and obviously, next year will be the end of Ben Sulayem’s first term. But, of course, that’s proving to be hard as well. On the serve…

If a member nation has multiple organisations representing various areas, they split the votes.So, for example Gabon controls 24 votes. As does Andorra, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Libya, etc.6/12

— Jeppe H. Olesen (@jeppe.bsky.social) 2024-12-03T19:51:18.571Z

The hit…

In contrast Motorsport UK controls 12 votes, despite being one of the largest motorsports organisations in the world, because they share the 24 total national votes with The Royal Automobile Club (6 votes) and IAM Roadsmart (6 votes).7/12

— Jeppe H. Olesen (@jeppe.bsky.social) 2024-12-03T19:51:18.572Z

And the rebound:

This makes the small members relatively more powerful in elections – and it means that a President could potentially buy an election, by promising to support the small organisations, either financially or by promising positions in the FIA.9/12

— Jeppe H. Olesen (@jeppe.bsky.social) 2024-12-03T19:51:18.574Z

The best part of this is that it would not be a surprise if this happens. Ben Sulayem had a $1.5 million “President’s Fund,” which was being investigated by the FIA audit committee.

The same committee that Ben Sulayem has now fired the head of, to go along with his firing of the compliance officer of the FIA ethics committee.

Now he’s trying to change the rules to essentially avoid the consequences of this fund that was under investigation.

It should be fairly clear at this point that this guy sucks and maybe shouldn’t be in charge of the FIA anymore. There are a couple of ways FOM and the teams can get this matter resolved, however.

Both parties have tremendous influence through the upcoming Concorde Agreement, which must be signed and finalized in time for the 2026 season.

The best way would be simply to refuse to play ball with this president. Give the organization the thumbs down regarding any agreement being made until Ben Sulayem is out of office. He can whine all he wants in this scenario, but the larger FIA would do this; the Federation, by all accounts, would go bankrupt quickly without its most profitable series.

The other way is to go the football route and just leave the FIA in the same bin as FIFA. Start a new independent series that just happens to travel the world and also have the same 11 teams in it.

This is easier said than done because the FIA holds the rights to the F1 name, among other very obvious complications.

But it’s clear that something has to happen at this point. This has been a complete disaster of a term and things are not going to get better for a long time at this rate magically.