Haas team principal Guenther Steiner’s call for Formula 1 to introduce permanent stewards failed to win support from his rivals.
Steiner blasted the Monaco Grand Prix stewards over the penalty imposed on his driver Nico Hulkenberg during the last race. He referred to them as “laymen”, which earned him an official reprimand from the FIA.
He also criticised F1’s practice of rotating the stewards between races, saying a permanent staff should be introduced to improve the consistency of decisions.
“It’s now time, we’ve been discussing this since years and years, and we always go back to this – every other sport has professional referees,” said Steiner.
“American racing, NASCAR, IndyCar – how many times you hear problems with the stewards or with the race directors’ decision? Very rarely. But they are doing it completely different. There is full-time people working there.”
However rival team bosses said they are satisfied with the current arrangement. “So far, this year, the stewards made correct decisions,” said AlphaTauri team principal Franz Tost, who pointed out only a small number of stewards are used by F1 over the course of a season.
“Most of the time the stewards are well-known,” he said. “It’s not that at every race that they’re completely new. They are changing from time to time, but you see always the same faces.
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“It’s always the same story – if a team has some troubles, for whatever reason, then at the end, they tell that it’s the stewards that are guilty. It’s not the stewards are guilty. If we do our job in a correct way, then I don’t think that the stewards make problems.”
Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack said he would “like to leave this for the FIA to decide” if the system needs to be changed. McLaren’s Andreas Seidl said they “trust the FIA.”
Several aspects of F1’s race management procedure were revised in the aftermath of the controversial end to the 2021 season, when FIA race director Michael Masi was ousted over his mishandling of the championship-deciding Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff, whose driver Lewis Hamilton lost the world championship in that race, also backed the current approach to officiating races.
“I never had my doubts in the system, I had my doubts in individuals,” he said. “And I think that as a steward and as a race director you have immense pressure to do the right things and probably every decision is going to have someone that likes it and the other one that doesn’t.
“So I think they’re just trying their best they can and we need to support the FIA where we can.”
Steiner has clashed with F1’s race management several times in recent years. He criticised the race director of the 2022 United States Grand Prix after he was given an incorrect deadline for the submission of a protest, which led to it being dismissed. Four years ago Steiner was fined for referring to a “stupid idiotic steward” during the Russian Grand Prix.
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