Perhaps any sporting governing body is appreciated best when seen and not heard, the quiet hand steering the ship to the approval of participants and fans alike, but discontent, criticism, public grievances and open avowals of a lack of confidence spell trouble. In Formula One this week the latter have swept across the paddock with calamitous abandon — Formula One’s regulator, the FIA, appears very much to have lost the dressingroom.
Heading into this weekend’s Australian Grand Prix, the FIA might have believed that a relatively straightforward weekend in the Melbourne sunshine was on the cards. It possibly anticipated that the announcement exonerating its president Mohammed Ben Sulayem for allegedly interfering in two grands prix but without giving any details of said investigation, its findings or conclusions would be subsumed by the controversy surrounding Christian Horner and Red Bull.
It was out of luck and, it could be argued, judgment on every count. Instead, the FIA has been on the receiving end of a series of damning indictments as the embattled organisation found its every action and indeed inaction, under intense scrutiny.
Only hours after the announcement that Ben Sulayem had been cleared was released on Wednesday, Susie Wolff, the managing director of the all-female F1 Academy series stated she was filing a criminal complaint against the FIA for its actions in bringing a conflict of interest investigation against her and her husband, the Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff, in December of last year. The allegations were found to be unsubstantiated and neither party had a case to answer.
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Wolff was furious at the reputational damage it caused and at what she considered intimidatory and misogynistic behaviour. Worse still once more the FIA did not explain the reasons for launching the investigation, which ostensibly appeared to have been prompted by a single unsubstantiated media story, or its findings and conclusions.
She has had the support and sympathy of the entire paddock and in Australia, her husband summed up succinctly why it was important and in so doing delivered the latest in the broadsides which have deluged the FIA since Wednesday.
“It matters for her most to find out what happened and people take accountability and responsibility and things are not brushed under the carpet,” he said. “We, as a sport, need to do that in all areas whether that is Susie’s case or some cases with the other teams.”
The day after Wolff gave notice of her legal action, Lewis Hamilton bluntly stated he had never had confidence in Ben Sulayem. Perhaps the most stinging rebuke of all given it was delivered by the sport’s biggest and most recognisable driver. He criticised a lack of accountability within the FIA and the sport, noting cuttingly that without it fans would lose trust in how it was run.
The seven-times champion’s words cannot be taken lightly and have, it seems, been long fermenting. In 2022, shortly after Ben Sulayem took over the FIA, Hamilton was targeted in a crackdown on wearing jewellery in the car. At the time it felt excessive and almost absurd, a butterfly on a wheel. Hamilton described it as silly, an opinion shared by most drivers and observers.
“If you think of the steps we have taken as a sport and the more important issues and causes we need to be focused on, this is such a small thing,” he said when there was a standoff over it at the Miami GP that year.
Notably at the time, he stated publicly he believed he could work with Ben Sulayem but was apparently already enormously frustrated and his remarks in Melbourne suggest he was at best simply being diplomatic at the time. Two years later his patience has clearly run out.
Nor was he alone. On Friday, the blows kept coming. At the team principals’ press conference all but one question concerned the FIA; its accountability, transparency, whether it was fit for purpose and whether anyone could have confidence in its processes, dominated the proceedings.
McLaren chief executive Zak Brown echoed what was becoming a tsunami of discontent. Of the FIA marking its own homework in its investigation into Ben Sulayem he noted pointedly they had not even shown their working. “Nothing was kind of explained to us, both on the front end and on the back end,” he said.
“We’re living in 2024, not 1984, which means total transparency,” he added. “Everyone would like these various topics to [be resolved to] enable us to go back to motor racing, but I think until all the unanswered questions are answered, people will continue to ask questions.”
All this pressure then has landed squarely on Ben Sulayem whose presidency has already seen no shortage of controversy and conflict and whose position will have been placed into doubt by events this weekend.
Yet by the close of play on Friday the FIA had still to make any comment on Wolff’s legal action, on Hamilton’s remarks or on the criticism of its investigation and the questions that all three have raised about a fundamental disquiet with the organisation and the way it is run. The silence of a manager, face drawn and haggard, retiring to the dugout, his team trooping past with disdain as another vital six-pointer slipped away.
