The FIA expects to continue revising its guidelines on driving standards and penalties, after making them public for the first time yesterday.
The latest changes to the guidelines were agreed following a meeting between Formula 1 drivers and the FIA at the Qatar Grand Prix in November last year. However F1 stewards chairperson Garry Connelly said the documents are unlikely to be definitive.
“Both the penalty guidelines and the driving standards guidelines are ‘living documents’,” he explained. “They are regularly reviewed and subject to refinement.
“Certainly, in the case of the driving standards guidelines, the consultation with the drivers has been of enormous value. The drivers’ contribution in Qatar was fabulous. They really adopted a great, cooperative spirit, and we all benefited from it.
“Both documents massively benefit from the input of teams and drivers and as [a] result they’re constantly evolving. The version we’re publishing now will be updated on a regular basis to cope with changing regulations, different demands on cars and drivers and also how the sport evolves too.”
The documents are intended to be used as a reference to understand the interpretation of F1’s rules.
“It’s really important to remember two things,” said Connelly. “Firstly, the guidelines are not regulations, they have no regulatory value. They are documents that have been created to assist the Formula 1 stewards in the objective of achieving fairness and consistency.
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“Secondly, in relation to penalties, they are solely a guide and one that stewards use in conjunction with a vast amount of other information.
“We have access to a large amount of CCTV footage that teams and the public don’t see. We have telemetry, radio messages, a whole range of data, and therefore, the guidelines might call for a 10-second penalty, but in considering all that other data, a different penalty may be applied.
“The penalty guidelines are not ‘hard and fast’ requirements – the recommended penalties sometimes sit within a range, where mitigating or aggravating circumstances are considered by the stewards in imposing a penalty at the lower end or the higher end of the range, or in extraordinary circumstance[s], outside of the range listed in the guidelines.”
The driving standards guidelines were created in response to concerns raised by F1 drivers over the stewards’ decisions relating to incidents during 2021. Connelly said publishing them will make it easier for fans to comprehend decisions made during F1 and other races.
“Twenty years ago, stewards’ decisions were a couple of lines at best,” he said. “These days, you’ll frequently find that they exceed a page in length because we’re trying to explain the rationale behind decisions.
“We feel we are accountable not just to the sport, but to the public as well. We need to provide clarity and explain why we make the decisions we do.
“It is also extremely important to note that rarely are two incidents identical. They may look the same on TV but when the stewards ‘deep dive’ into the additional data available to them, there can be valid reasons why one incident is penalised differently to another seemingly similar one, or indeed, not penalised at all. Stewards also give more tolerance to multi-car incidents early in the first lap of a race.”
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