F1 News

vasseur and bayer on fia investigations and transparency

'The fans don't ask about lawsuits, they talk about understeer'

1 April at 10:00
14
  • Ludo van Denderen

Until recently, few outsiders had probably heard of the FIA's Ethics Commission. The independent body was investigating a possible conflict of interest between Toto and Susie Wolff, FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem's influence on race management, and now a Red Bull employee's complaint against team boss Christian Horner. These are different cases, but they have something in common: they are being dealt with, without much coming out about what and how anything was investigated.

Is this transparent enough? Peter Bayer, the CEO of Visa Cash App RB and thus a colleague of Horner, would first of all like to stress that these are three completely different cases. As a former employee of the motorsport federation, he is also convinced that enough capable people are engaged in properly assessing each complaint.

Red Bull chief wants to learn and grow as a sport

"I think one thing that we see is the sport has grown massively in a very short amount of time," says Bayer. "A lot of people are asking for transparency. We will have to try and understand where we can have transparency, because when it's about individual topics or complaints coming through a whistleblowing hotline [in the case of Ben Sulayem], you have to make sure that there is absolute guarantee and protection of the people doing whistleblowing. I think that when it's about employment contracts, those are not meant to be shared with anyone. So it's difficult. As a sport, we have to learn and grow. I think that's what we need to do through these processes and hopefully can come back and focus on racing."

Ferrari's team boss Fred Vasseur followed up: "I join Peter on the fact that we need to have transparency on all these cases. But honestly, the fans, they are not asking me at all about this. The fans are speaking about oversteering, about understeering, about competition. I’ve never had a fan or a guest asking me about the court case and so on. We have to be focused on our business."