The FIA Stewards and the Matter of Who Hands Down a Penalty

I put in a protest at a regional race once. A driver had gone by me under a full-course yellow and held his place, so I objected. It set me back a hundred dollars and twenty minutes on my Sunday. Three men read what I had to say and the timing sheet, made up their minds the pass predated the flag and returned the money with an apology I had no use for. In the end they were right. The paperwork showed my recollection of the sequence was off.

It is good background when one watches Formula 1, where the very same set up is in force at the top of the sport and is called a conspiracy about once a month. One driver is given five seconds, another nothing for what appears to be the same infraction, and the paddock concludes the stewards are either bought or inept. The truth of it is four people, a rulebook, some published guidelines and a panel that is different each weekend.

Who are the stewards

Every Grand Prix has four officials on the panel, as the table above shows. The FIA keeps a pool of twelve over the course of a season: four chairs, five second stewards and three ex-Formula 1 drivers. From this pool comes one of each for every event while the host country’s national federation provides the fourth. The regulations set the FIA’s own share at a minimum of three and a maximum of four, and at six events the FIA considers especially demanding it appoints the full four, so the panel sits five. They all have an FIA Super

Licence, go through yearly training and sit a written test at the close of it. The pool has been cut back considerably over the last ten years by design; it is easier to be consistent with twelve.

A former driver in the room

One spot is reserved for someone with time in these cars and the names change with the season. We have had Derek Warwick, Danny Sullivan, Emanuele Pirro and Vitantonio Liuzzi in it, with Liuzzi, Pedro Lamy and Warwick doing so in 2026. There is a simple logic to it. A collision in the braking zone means something else to the man who has been in one at three hundred kilometers an hour on cold rubber with a car next to him. The panel is better for having that view in the room rather than reading of it later.

How an investigation is run

Race control will flag an incident and report it to the stewards, the process is in the second table. Two documents dictate the result. The Driving Standards Guidelines put a name to acceptable racing in certain circumstances and the Guidelines for Penalties and Points put typical transgressions to recommended sanctions. A first offense for causing contact in the braking zone has a standard penalty and the panel works from there.

What can be appealed

This is the source of most frustration since the answer is not what is hoped for. Time penalties, drive-throughs, reprimands, grid drops and stop-and-gos are final on issuance. A driver on lap thirty with five seconds to serve has no way to make an argument of it.

Then there is the right of review. A team has two weeks to present the stewards with something of import that was not on hand when the call was made. The threshold for that is high. Red Bull put it to the test after the 2023 Austrian Sprint but the panel would have none of it as the telemetry in question could have been had. Past that is the International Court of Appeal in Paris, independent of the race officials and accessed via the national federation. Those appeals take weeks or months and seldom come to anything.

Inconsistency in the decisions

The FIA has put out the figures on this and they should be known before the next row. In 2025 the stewards were presented with 509 cases and incidents, put 405 to the investigation and put pen to paper 410 times. Penalties were handed down in 153, just over a quarter of everything referred to them. Two review petitions and three protests were dealt with in the same span.

So formal challenges came in on five of more than four hundred decisions. That does not put the matter to rest because the ones in dispute are the championship deciders and the routine calls are forgotten. Guenther Steiner made the structural point after Monaco, taking issue with laymen ruling on million dollar careers. He was reprimanded for the words and said sorry, but the question he posed over permanent professional stewards lingers.

My hundred dollars gave me twenty minutes and an answer I did not care for. The drivers get a hearing and a verdict in writing within the hour which they will be questioned on in front of a camera before they have even read it. The structure is identical. The scrutiny is not.

What readers ask about F1 stewards

Who are the stewards in Formula 1?

Four officials at every Grand Prix: a chair, a second FIA steward, a former Formula 1 driver and a steward nominated by the host country federation. At six events the FIA adds a fourth of its own and the panel sits five. All hold an FIA Super Licence and pass an annual assessment.

Can a stewards’ decision be appealed?

Not in most cases. Time penalties, drive-throughs, stop-and-gos, reprimands and grid drops are final. A team has fourteen days to request a review, but only with new evidence that was unavailable at the time.

How are stewards different from the race director?

The race director runs the event itself, including the start procedure, safety car and red flags. The stewards judge incidents and decide penalties, and the two roles are held by different people.

Why is a former driver on the panel?

To give the panel a competitor’s view of what a situation looked like from the cockpit. The seat rotates through the season among three former Formula 1 drivers.

How many penalty points mean a ban?

Twelve within a rolling twelve months bring a one-race suspension, after which twelve points are removed. Each point expires twelve months after it was issued.

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.