Who Writes the Rules in Formula 1, and Who Has to Agree

My club has a rulebook, a competition board that interprets it, and a membership that complains about both. A protest costs a hundred dollars, goes to three people in a trailer, and the decision is final in the sense that arguing further only annoys everybody.

The same three parts exist in Formula 1, several orders of magnitude larger and held together by a contract. Work out which part does what and most of the inexplicable things stop being inexplicable.

The parties and the paperwork

Governing body, that is the FIA. The sporting, technical and financial regulations are written and enforced there. So are the licenses for drivers and circuits, the appointment of stewards and the running of race control. A five second penalty comes from that side of the house.

Commercial rights sit with Formula One Group, which Liberty Media owns. Television deals, promoter contracts, the shape of the calendar and the distribution of the money all belong there. A new country on the schedule is their doing, not the FIA’s.

Third of the three parties are the eleven teams, and calling them participants undersells it considerably. Committees where regulations get drafted have team people sitting on them, and no significant rule change reaches the grid without going through a room they are in.

How a rule actually gets made

A proposal starts in one of the advisory committees, where the technical people from the teams and the FIA argue about the detail. What survives goes to the F1 Commission, which brings together the teams, the FIA and the commercial rights holder.

From there it goes to the World Motor Sport Council, the FIA body that gives final approval, and then it gets published. The table above has the path in order.

Timing matters as much as the content. Rules for the following season face deadlines after which a larger majority is needed, which is why so many arguments in this sport happen in June rather than in December.

The contract underneath all of it

What holds the three parties together is the Concorde Agreement, and the current one is the ninth. The commercial half was signed in March 2025 and the governance half in December, with all eleven teams, the FIA and Formula One Group on it. The term runs from 2026 to 2030, lining up exactly with the current technical regulations.

Dividing the money is the commercial half’s business. Everything about how decisions get made sits in the other one, and so do the fees. Voting structure in the F1 Commission. Entry fees paid by the teams to the FIA. The remit of the governing body itself. That fee system came out of this agreement rebuilt, with the teams and the commercial rights holder both putting more into it than before.

One detail from the new agreement is worth more than the rest, and reporting around the signing put numbers on it. From 2026 a normal majority in the F1 Commission needs four team votes out of eleven rather than six, and a super majority needs six rather than eight, alongside the votes of the FIA and the commercial rights holder. Weight moves toward those two and away from a blocking minority of teams.

Who actually won that negotiation

Deadlock was the problem being solved. Under the previous arrangement a small group of teams could stall a change that most of the paddock wanted, usually because the change would cost them something specific.

The fix shifts influence upward, and whether that is good depends entirely on what you think of the people it was shifted to. A sport that can act quickly can also act hastily, and the body that now carries more weight is the same one that was criticized after Abu Dhabi in 2021.

My own view, worth exactly what a club racer’s view is worth here, is that the previous system was worse. Rules written by the people who have to race under them will always protect whoever is currently winning.

Where the structure shows its seams

Three places, and they are the ones that produce most of the paddock arguments.

Enforcement, because writing a financial regulation is easier than policing one across eleven companies in several countries. Interpretation, because a sentence that seemed clear in a committee room reads differently on the last lap of a championship. And speed, because the calendar moves faster than any committee structure designed to govern it.

Our version of all three fits inside a trailer, and I have sat in it. A rule gets written about tire compounds. Somebody then turns up with a compound that technically complies, and a Saturday goes by while three people decide what that sentence actually meant. The scale is different. The problem is identical.

Why it matters to somebody watching

Because almost every complaint about this sport is really a complaint about one of the three parties, and they are usually the wrong one.

Calendar too long, races in the wrong countries, start times that suit nobody: that is the commercial rights holder. Penalties, technical directives and cost cap decisions belong to the FIA. Rules that protect the established order and make life difficult for a newcomer are what happens when the teams have a vote.

Knowing which door to knock on does not change anything. It does make the arguing more accurate, which at our club is considered the highest form of sportsmanship.

Jake Holloway is a club racer, track-day instructor, and motorsports editor based near Charlotte, North Carolina. He has raced karts, Legends cars, Spec Miatas, and amateur endurance cars, and he writes for GreenyCars about how racing actually works, from the rule book to the pit lane.