Q: The FIA has decided to publish two documents, the F1 Penalty Guidelines and the F1 Driving Standards Guidelines. Why is it important to put them into the public domain?

GC: First and foremost, releasing these documents is consistent with the FIA President’s desire for transparency and for ensuring that our judicial processes are understood as widely as possible. And what could be more transparent than making public the guidelines that you use in determining breaches of the rules and penalties for those breaches. Secondly, both documents have been available in some form to teams but only to some members of the media and that can often lead to confusion and inaccuracy. The wide release of both documents at this point avoids any confusion.

Q: Explain the background to both sets of documents. How did they come about and what purpose do they serve?

GC: The Penalty Guidelines have been in existence for about a decade and they were developed because we felt we needed to do what many panels of judges do in the civil and criminal courts, where they have a band of penalties published among themselves that provide a framework for judges to use. I think we started with one or two pages and now the Penalty Guidelines cover about 10 pages and roughly 100 common issues and infringements. The Guidelines are updated at least annually and often during the season, based on feedback from the Stewards, the teams and the drivers.

Q: The Driving Standards Guidelines are a much more recent development, aren’t they?

GC: That’s right. The Driving Standards Guidelines were introduced in 2022 at the request of the Formula 1 drivers. There was a driver’s briefing, I believe it was in Qatar in 2021, and the drivers asked the then race director for a set of guidelines. These were developed during the European winter and released prior to the first race in 2022. They’ve been modified twice since, most recently based on a very positive meeting we had with the drivers at the 2024 Qatar Grand Prix, which in particular resulted in developing revised guidelines on overtaking on the inside and the outside of corners. The meeting resulted in a new draft of the Guidelines being circulated to the drivers via the GPDA and based on comments received and input from the drivers, the FIA Single Seater Department, the FIA Drivers’ Committee and the Formula 1 Teams, the guidelines we’re now releasing were distributed to teams and drivers prior to the first round of the 2025 championship.

Q: Does the release of the Guidelines mean that fans now have an easy handbook to see what penalty should be applied to an incident or infringement?

GC: It’s really important to remember two things: firstly, the Guidelines are not regulations, they have no regulatory value. They are documents that have been created to assist the Formula 1 Stewards in the objective of achieving fairness and consistency. Secondly, in relation to penalties, they are solely a guide and one that Stewards use in conjunction with a vast amount of other information. We have access to a large amount of CCTV footage that teams and the public don’t see. We have telemetry, radio messages, a whole range of data, and therefore, the guidelines might call for a 10-second penalty, but in considering all that other data, a different penalty may be applied. The Penalty Guidelines are not ‘hard and fast’ requirements – the recommended penalties sometimes sit within a range, where mitigating or aggravating circumstances are considered by the Stewards in imposing a penalty at the lower end or the higher end of the range, or in extraordinary circumstance, outside of the range listed in the Guidelines.

Q: Is it therefore important that the penalties suggested by the Guidelines are looked at in conjunction with the Stewards’ document relating to a particular incident in order to fully understand why a particular penalty has been applied?

GC: Absolutely. Twenty years ago, Stewards’ decisions were a couple of lines at best. These days, you’ll frequently find that they exceed a page in length because we’re trying to explain the rationale behind decisions. We feel we are accountable not just to the sport, but to the public as well. We need to provide clarity and explain why we make the decisions we do. It is also extremely important to note that rarely are two incidents identical. They may look the same on TV but when the Stewards ‘deep dive’ into the additional data available to them, there can be valid reasons why one incident is penalised differently to another seemingly similar one, or indeed, not penalised at all. Stewards also give more tolerance to multi-car incidents early in the first lap of a race.

Q: Both of these documents have been revised several times. Will that process continue?

GC: Both the Penalty Guidelines and the Driving Standards Guidelines are ‘living documents’. They are regularly reviewed and subject to refinement. Certainly, in the case of the Driving Standards Guidelines, the consultation with the drivers has been of enormous value. The drivers’ contribution in Qatar was fabulous. They really adopted a great, cooperative spirit, and we all benefited from it. Both documents massively benefit from  the input of teams and drivers and as result they’re constantly evolving. The version we’re publishing now will be updated  on a regular basis to cope with changing regulations, different demands on cars  and drivers and also how the sport  evolves too.