Masi defends delays over F1 stewards’ decisions in Brazil & Qatar

The FIA took a significant amount of time to announce Lewis Hamilton’s disqualification ahead of sprint qualifying at Interlagos, while the outcome of Mercedes’ right to review hearing was delayed overnight in Qatar from an incident that took place in Sao Paulo.

Defending the lengthy stewards’ decisions, Masi said in Qatar: “I think you need to remember that one of the things, and I’d say all of you around this table have asked for, have always asked for more description in decisions rather than just saying this person is guilty or this person is not guilty, you actually want as much of an understanding as possible of the process that has gone through.

“If there were any other similar types of cases, the stewards try and write their decision – be that last weekend, this weekend, or any of them that sort of have a level of nuance to them – they put that level of detail into them.

“It takes time, draft, rewrite etc. we can have decisions, and that’s one part.”

Masi explained that input from the F1 teams themselves can make the process more complicated.

“The other part is the teams need to be given the opportunity to present their case,” Masi added. “As an example, last weekend in Brazil, effectively in total over the two days, give or take round figures Mercedes were presenting to the stewards for about 2.5 hours, so you’ve got to put that into account as well along with sessions and everything else in between. 

“I think sometimes the stewards would be happy to just write ‘this person has breached the rules’ and end of story, but then we’ll go back a few years and most of you around this table have said you want more description.”