Stewarding fiasco reveals need for deep FIA changes

If there's one positive thing you can say about the modern FIA, it's that sometimes they make the right decision eventually.

Admittedly, praise with that many qualifiers is barely praise at all - we've got a phrase for that - which probably says more about the state of the FIA than they'd like. However, credit where it's due, Johnny Herbert is no longer a steward on Formula 1 races.

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Herbert, a middling former driver best known for his season and a bit as Michael Schumacher's team-mate at Benetton in the mid-90s, managed to become one of the most talked about figures in the second half of a 2024 season which featured battles for both drivers' and constructors' championships.

Herbert was held up as the architect of what were perceived to be overly harsh penalty decisions against Max Verstappen. None of them were truly egregious, but the sport's recent penchant for inconsistent penalties for similar-seeming incidents only served to play into the paranoia.

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Why was Herbert released by the FIA?

It's never a good sign when an official becomes the story (hello Michael Oliver!) and in many sports, the answer is to hide them from attention for a while – give them a couple of low-profile events, give them a week off, that kind of thing.

That wasn't really possible for Herbert, for reasons entirely of his own making. There's one line in the FIA's statement announcing his departure which stands out and makes that incredibly stark.

"However, after discussion, it was mutually agreed that his duties as an FIA steward and that of a media pundit were incompatible."

Herbert's position was untenable the moment his impartiality started to be questioned. To be making race-altering decisions on the Sunday before turning around and giving lengthy and provocative quotes to betting outlets on the Monday is more than just undignified.

When those quotes involve you penalising a driver twice in one lap and then criticising his 'horrible mindset' afterward, you look like you have a grudge.

Herbert may well have been able to set his personal feelings about Verstappen's style aside when making his FIA decisions, but by that point it had stopped mattering. When you're in charge of rules and their enforcement, it's not enough to be impartial – you have to appear it too. When you stop appearing impartial, every single thing you do is questioned. The man behind the curtain becomes talked about more than the drivers on track. The garnish has eaten the steak. It can't go on.

None of that is even to mention the fact of who Herbert is providing the quotes to. For an active steward to have a relationship with betting companies, more lucrative than the largely unpaid stewarding gigs incidentally, is an absolutely outrageous state of affairs.

The fact that he and other stewards are allowed to do that is an absurd conflict of interests. There's no evidence of any untoward actions from stewards as a result of links with gambling companies, but it's outrageous that the door is even open.

Of course, the door is open because FIA stewards aren't paid to do the job. For one of the most monied, high profile sports in the world to use unpaid, part-time stewards is so asinine as to look unbelievable. If the FIA tell a steward 'pick stewarding or your media commitments, but not both', they'll lose stewards. Indeed, that appears to be the substance of Herbert's exit this week.

Why it took this long for that conversation to be held is a mystery.

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Zak Brown also happened to be talking about the stewarding issue on Wednesday, leaving some in the unusual position of agreeing with him unreservedly.

"To have part-time, unpaid stewards in a multi-billion-dollar sport where everything is on the line to make the right call...it is a technical job and when you get it right, no one says ‘great job’. But I don’t think we are set up for success by not having full-time stewards.

"I’d like us to take a step back, loosen it up. Have full time stewards who can make more of a subjective decision of whether that was right or wrong."

The follow-up question is always a simple one: who's paying for that, then? The FIA, for all of its power, is not a wealthy organisation.

Brown suggested that he'd welcome a system in which the teams all contributed to the costs of full-time paid stewards alongside the FIA, adding 'in the big scheme of things I do not think it will be a significant amount'.

With teams set to see the cost cap balloon to $215m in 2026, and already paying out significant costs outside that cap as it is, he's right. There are three stewards to a race, so let's hypothetically suggest a rotating cast of maybe five, to cover off and allow breaks for illness and to manage the gruelling schedule.

Each team throwing as little as $250,000 into the pot would mean that those five stewards would be looking at a little over half a million dollars a year each once Audi join, with the potential for the FIA bumping that figure themselves. Their food, travel, accommodation and the like are already covered. Suddenly, this is a job compensated well enough that supplementing the income by making headlines for gambling sites is no longer a necessity.

It's simple. Pay stewards. Bar them from giving quotes to any betting organisations, at the very least. Keep the attention on the track, and ensure that the decisions are being made by the best suited people. It's really not that hard.

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