Single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis believes the FIA will be “a more professional body in the future” following the introduction of a new officials departure.

And he says it was “probably getting a bit unfair” for F1’s governing body to rely on volunteers.

FIA to become ‘more professional body’ with new officials department

The FIA announced plans last year for a new officials department aimed at training the next generation of officials in motor racing.

The department is headed by Matteo Perini, a long-serving steward who has been appointed as the FIA’s sports officials manager.

The FIA have been frequently criticised by F1 teams and drivers over recent years for the perceived inconsistency of stewards’ decisions, leading to calls for permanent stewards.

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Mohammed Ben Sulayem, the FIA president, has so far resisted calls for permanent stewards, arguing last month that the F1 drivers themselves should pay for permanent stewards.

Ben Sulayem, whose leadership of the governing body has been widely criticised since he came to power in late 2021, added: “Stewards do not grow on trees.

“It takes time to educate them. It takes time to train them. And then you evolve them, so we have a programme.

“I see the point about having them maybe like the Premier League where they [referees] are paid, but we don’t have the money to do that.”

Mr Tombazis, who previously worked for the McLaren and Ferrari teams, believes the introduction of the officials department will have the desired effect of making the FIA a “more professional” organisation with a “wider pool of people” available to officiate.

And he hopes that the new system will result in more thorough reviews of stewards’ decisions after every race, allowing the FIA to achieve greater consistency.

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.

“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, it 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.”

Mr Tombazis went on to defend the previous system as “reasonably OK” – but acknowledged the need for the FIA to take a further step by producing a “proper department” to train officials.

He said: “There’s already a high-performance steward programme and race director programme, which has been going on for a couple of years.

“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 OK 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.”

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