The Race Director, and the Decisions Nobody Gets to Take Back

Our club has a clerk of the course, and on a wet Saturday in April he is the least enviable person at the circuit. Rain arrives halfway through a session, somebody spins at the fastest corner, and one man with a radio has about four seconds to decide whether the session continues. Whatever he picks, forty drivers will explain afterward why the other choice was obviously correct. He gets paid in sandwiches and a parking spot.

Formula 1 has the same job with a different title and a budget, and most viewers attribute its decisions to the wrong people. Penalties come from the stewards, who work after the fact and publish written reasoning. Race control works while the race is happening, cannot take anything back, and is the reason a race runs at all on a day when it probably should not.

What the job actually covers

Race control is the room, and the race director runs it. The table above has the responsibilities, and the common thread is that all of them are live decisions with no appeal attached, because they are not judgments about behavior.

Starting the race on time or holding it. Sending the safety car out and calling it back in. Showing a red flag when a stranded car sits somewhere a two hundred mile an hour field cannot avoid it. Deciding which flags appear at which marshal posts, and managing the several hundred volunteers waving them. From 2026 an FIA remote operations room assists with monitoring track limits, which takes one category of work off a desk that had too much on it.

None of this involves deciding whether somebody drove badly. That belongs to the stewards, and the separation matters more than the paddock usually admits. A red flag is not a penalty. Neither is a safety car, however much it rearranges a race, and neither can be protested afterward in the way a five second penalty can.

Why the two roles get confused

Timing, mostly. Decisions from race control land during the race and everybody sees them instantly, while the stewards publish a document twenty minutes later that half the audience never reads. So the person visible at the moment of the decision gets credited with all of it.

There is a second reason, and it is structural. Both roles answer to the same governing body, both appear in the same broadcast graphics, and both are described by commentators as the FIA. A viewer watching a safety car arrive and a five second penalty appear within the same minute has no obvious way to know that two different sets of people made those calls under two different parts of the rulebook.

The people who have held it

Charlie Whiting ran race control for over twenty years, until his unexpected death on the eve of the 2019 season opener. Michael Masi, who had been expected to serve as his deputy, took the job instead and held it until February 2022, when an FIA investigation into the previous year’s Abu Dhabi finale concluded that the regulations had been applied incorrectly and removed him.

What followed was unusual. The FIA split the role between Eduardo Freitas and Niels Wittich, who alternated race by race through 2022, an arrangement nobody repeated. Wittich continued alone until November 2024, when he stepped down with three rounds remaining and Rui Marques took over from the Las Vegas Grand Prix, having arrived from Formula 2 and Formula 3.

What the job looks like in 2026

Marques is still in the chair, and the table above has the sequence of people in the role. The gaps between the dates tell the story on their own.

The deputy position is worth a note, because published sources do not agree on who currently holds it. Some list Claire Dubbelman, who served as permanent deputy through the 2025 season, and at least one account names Paul Burns for 2026. The FIA has changed this appointment more than once in recent seasons, so the safest statement is that the deputy exists and the name should be checked against the current entry list.

What to watch for

Two habits make a weekend easier to read. When something happens on track, ask whether the response is about safety or about conduct, because the first belongs to race control and the second to the stewards. And when a decision looks slow, remember that the alternative to a considered call is usually an immediate wrong one.

Our clerk of the course called a red flag that April afternoon, and the rain stopped four minutes later. He heard about it for the rest of the season. The scale is different at the top, where the same four seconds can decide a championship and the review afterward runs to a published report. The job is identical. So is the part where everybody else knows better.

Questions about the race director

01

What does the F1 race director do?

Runs race control during the weekend. That covers the start, the safety car, red flags, the flags shown at marshal posts and the monitoring of track limits.

02

Who is the F1 race director in 2026?

Rui Marques, who took the role from the 2024 Las Vegas Grand Prix and has held it since.

03

How is the race director different from the stewards?

The race director acts live and deals with safety and the running of the event. The stewards judge driver conduct afterward and issue penalties with written reasoning.

04

Why was Michael Masi removed?

An FIA investigation into the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix concluded that the regulations had been applied incorrectly, and he left the role in February 2022.

05

Can a race director’s decision be appealed?

No. Safety car deployments, red flags and flag decisions are not penalties, so there is no appeal route of the kind that exists for stewards’ decisions.

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.