FIA Confirms Huge Plans For Stewarding Changes After 2024 Backlash

FIA single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis has confirmed that Formula 1's governing body will eventually adopt the model of having full-time paid stewards through its new Officials Department rather than continuing its current model of relying on volunteers on race weekends.
Last year, a debate arose between F1 drivers, represented collectively by the Grand Prix Drivers' Association, and FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem. The drivers called for full-time stewards to ensure consistency in rule enforcement while also raising several concerns regarding Ben Sulayem's leadership.
Throughout the 2024 season, there were multiple instances of inconsistent penalties for similar offenses, especially during the United States Grand Prix and the Mexico City Grand Prix. However, Ben Sulayem dampened hopes of introducing paid, full-time stewards, stating that the FIA could not cover the costs and suggested that the sport itself should fund them.
Now though, Tombazis' update suggests a move away from the FIA's alleged reluctance to have full-time stewards. Speaking about plans to make the FIA a more "professional body," 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. That's not to exclude volunteers, but it's to have a body that can spend the Monday morning after a race analysing every single decision, making sure it was reached correctly, seeing what could be improved, etc.
"That will be combined with a more powerful remote centre, where more monitoring will take place for 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 analysing 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 pointed out that the current process to shortlist and select stewards has been effective for many years but acknowledged that the time had arrived to make things more professional. However, he disagreed with the common notion that rules were applied inconsistently on many race weekends last year. He said:
"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. 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."