I’ve said for some time now, that more people need to treat people in F1 the same way they would as politicians, and their behaviour suddenly makes a lot more sense. And for those who don’t know, it’s an important year for a certain FIA President, Mohammed Ben Sulayem. His first term as FIA President is up in December, and you can already see him making the moves to try and win that second-term.
Mind Your F***ing Language
He’s walked back some of his draconian fines on swearing. Now as I’ve been saying for sometime, everybody involved in this overreacted to what I deemed from the start, a non-issue. A sport where the going rate for swearing in a press conference was less than 2% across 2024 had Max Verstappen have a total strop across Singapore’s race weekend for taking a community service day as punishment, fans exaggerated the penalty to the point where people genuinely thought swearing in the cars was banned (It wasn’t, MBS just suggested it, blame Formula One’s Management for publishing decisions), and the GPDA led by George Russell flipped out, joining Instagram just to publicly write an open letter about it, criticising MBS for treating them like “children”.
MBS opened the year by classifying that swearing was a form of “misconduct” with a $10k baseline fine, multiplied by how important their championship was (x4 for F1), and threatened six-figure fines and potential suspensions for repeat offenders. I get you’d want to stamp out any chance of it happening by scaring people, but given this was never really an issue in the first place, it came off as completely over the top. As said before, there’s nothing inherently wrong with making sure your product is family-friendly, you don’t ever want to potentially alienate anyone from watching you, but it’s not like Carlos Sainz was walking into a presser imitating South Park: The Movie every week.
Alongside the World Rally Championship’s drivers threatening to boycott end of stage interviews after Adrien Formaux took a $30k fine for an accidental “shit”, Ben Sulayem walked back the punishments this week, reducing the baseline fine to $5k, drastically reducing the multipliers, implementing a warning for first-time offenders and giving stewards the right to apply mitigation. Common sense prevailed in the end, but cynically you do have to wonder given the timing, and leaning on his own rally driving past, how much of this was trying to swing some public favour around given that re-election in December.
…But They Sound Good
MBS was also extremely vocal about pushing for a return of V10’s into the sport on sustainable fuels, potentially usurping the current V6 turbo-hybrids as soon as 2028, despite a huge sporting regulation shift for next season. It was always going to be a long shot at best, and it was rightly shot down a fortnight ago. As much as people don’t like to admit it, road relevance is a huge reason as to why manufacturers take part in F1, to help sell their road cars. The marketing value by winning Championships within it can get into the billions of dollars. Given the lay of the automotive land right now, how is a naturally-aspirated V10 that revs to 20,000rpm in any way relevant in a world that has maybe 10 years of the internal combustion engine left before we’re all going either hybrid or fully-electric?
And as much as sustainable fuels sounds sexy on paper, it’s nowhere near scalable enough yet to truly call it “sustainable”, given the amount of resources you need to farm to create it, and the amount of energy needed to burn it at an efficient enough temperature. It was always “pie in the sky” thinking from Ben Sulayem, sold down the river by the FOM calling his bluff, only to be shot down by the manufacturers.
F1’s never been in a better place in terms of factory backing – Honda’s back, Audi’s coming, General Motors is coming for 2029, Ford’s tied up with Red Bull. We’re set to have six power-unit suppliers on the grid in the next three years, and at least half of them shot the V10 idea down in cold blood. Because why on earth would they kill off billions of dollars in developing hybrids for their road cars to instead develop a thirsty, inefficient design of 20 years ago that wouldn’t work on cars that weigh 150 kilos more than they used to?
MBS was trying to score one for the boomers, who aren’t even relevant in this because we F1 fans over the age of 30 don’t get a say in who their FIA President is. So what was the point?
“I AM The Senate“
Last week, after months of potential rumours and names being thrown in the ring, Carlos Sainz Sr essentially used Autosport as his media-based feeler as to whether he could run as FIA President, publicly declaring that he was considering a run for the position. Again, I suspect some of the FIA’s national delegates have gone around and said: “Have a go and I’d back you”. James Vowles has also gone public saying he’d be a “good fit”.
It goes hand-in-hand with a bunch of secret documents that MBS has been organising internally within the FIA, that leaked out publicly via an Andrew Benson report at the BBC earlier this week. Some of the notions put forth by the President included:
- Bringing forward the application deadline for potential new candidates
- Bringing forward the deadline for presidential teams from 21 to 49 days before the election
- That the FIA President has final say on the final four members of the FIA senate that runs the organization
- There “must not be anything in the record of the candidates standing for the election as members of the presidential list that calls into question their professional integrity”.
- Changes to the World Motorsport Council so that no more than two elected members are from the same country
And so on. I highlighted one bulletpoint in red in particular. Funny that. I wonder, could there be a small conflict of interest at play if Carlos Sainz Sr ran for President given his son is an active competitor in F1 right now? Hmm. If I didn’t know any better, this combined with walking back deadlines says to me that MBS is trying to up the pressure on a potential leadership contest by giving people less time to play with.
As Benson’s excellent reporting describes in the piece, there are genuinely valid reasons for some of these proposed changes, if you’re more positively inclined to take it at face value. But if you’re a bit more cynical, you could easily describe these changes as actions from a man who wants to tighten his grip for power and control within the FIA.
And given MBS has already butted heads with Formula One Management on multiple occasions over swearing and grid expansion, ran a whole heap of senior staff out of the organisation, accusations of bullying and public dissent with the media and its Grand Prix drivers over how he runs the organisation… are you giving him that benefit of the doubt?
Meet The Hamilton’s
And the last one that came around last night that inspired this piece, it turns out Lewis Hamilton’s father Anthony, is now officially on the FIA payroll, in a job that’s been described as helping youth driver development. According to Autosport, he’s been doing this as an advisor on the side for the last 18 months, but has impressed MBS to the point where he’s now officially in a job with the organisation.
The FIA is launching a youth driver pathway at their next conference next month, which I’ll keeping tabs on because it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to point out the junior ladder in F1 is a hot mess. But it does kinda beg the question – Just because you have the sports most prevalent feel good story of raising the sport’s greatest ever driver in F1, doesn’t necessarily mean you know or are qualified to run a youth development programme on a larger scale.
If you want a couple of easy examples on the contrary to Anthony Hamilton, look at racing’s other most famous recent influential father – Jos Verstappen. He’s also on a payroll, Red Bull’s specifically. And given what we know about how Jos raised his son Max into Formula 1, as well as his own arrest for domestic violence, tell me, does that sound like a man you want involved in a talent scouting role with drivers that are likely children coming up through the ladder? Just raising a talent that happened to make it to the very highest level isn’t a compelling enough argument on its own to me.
Davide Brivio was the same when Alpine hired him out of Suzuki’s MotoGP Championship winning team. He was placed in a role as Director of Racing Expansions, with one role of which being in charge of Alpine’s driver academy. Brivio had no prior experience of open-wheel driver development, and in shocking news, he was gone just three years later as he returned to MotoGP to run Trackhouse. It goes to show you that the world of Motorsport is far more likely to just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks, compared to other sports.
So with that in mind, again, I ask, is this about giving Anthony Hamilton a genuinely viable path to improving the FIA, or is it a media pumping move to promote the man who went viral for consoling Isack Hadjar in Australia? I don’t want to be that cynical about what I felt at the time was a genuinely powerful, heartfelt moment where one of F1’s few black figures extended an olive branch, but the fact this feels like is a valid question speaks volumes.
Like I mentioned at the top of the piece – Treat them like politicians and it all starts making sense. Like national political parties, when there’s 12-18 months to go, you’re in full blown election mode, doing and saying whatever it takes to win and either stay in power, or get into it. And Ben Sulayem is pushing hard with strategies that seem focused on trying to earn back some public favour, while quietly kneecapping potential opposition.
This is getting weird, and I feel it’s only going to get weirder by the time December rolls around.
