New review system pondered by F1 stewards

Editor

During a meeting in Vienna earlier in the week, the FIA came to the conclusion that there is room for improvement with their review system, aiming for more consistency.

Drivers throughout the season complained that they were getting penalised for offences that weren’t punished on separates incidents, with stewards’ Chairman Garry Connelly saying that consistency is high on their priority list.

“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,” he told Motorsport.com.

“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.”

One of the main talking points at the meeting were the incidents at the Mexico Grand Prix, where Lewis Hamilton ran wide onto the grass and went unpunished, while Max Verstappen got penalised for the same offence.

Connelly added that they may add a few circuit changes to the tracks around the globe in an attempt to make a more clear-cut decision on penalties.

“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,” he explained.

“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.”