FIA announce a new department: Officials must become 'more professional'

FIA wants more professionalism with new officials department

There have been repeated calls from the Formula 1 world, including from a number of F1 drivers, for FIA stewards to become more professional. With the new officials' department, the governing body appears to be heeding that call. The federation itself also sees the need for change.

"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," Tombazis told Motorsport.com, referring to the fact that the duties are voluntary. "We want to go to a more professional body in the future."

The FIA chief explains that it is not meant to exclude volunteers, but there is a wish to have a governing body that can spend the Monday morning after a race analysing every decision. That way, the FIA wants to make sure that decisions have been discussed in the right way and to see what can be improved.

'There is a lot of comment on the consistency of the stewards'

Remotely, there will be a centre from which there will be more monitoring of all kinds of penalties, and all that will be linked. Ultimately, there should be a wider pool of people available, which should ensure more time to analyse fouls and decisions.

"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, which 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," Tombazis explained.

This article was written in collaboration with Olly Darcy

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