Why Discretion Is Killing Formula One

 Abstract

This article is not intended as an accusation against the Federation. Rather, it is intended as a tool for dialogue and comparison, based on the belief that it is technical and regulatory debate, rather than confrontation, that moves the sport forward. However, what happened at Silverstone on Sunday, at the end of the 2026 British Grand Prix, highlights an issue that was identified well before the start of the season in an academic paper written by Magdalena Ferrer, Anirban Aly Mandal and myself, which compared the 2024, 2025 and 2026 Sporting Regulations. The paper concluded that granting Race Control greater discretion without providing clear objective criteria would inevitably lead to the kind of inconsistencies witnessed on the track on Sunday.

A Longstanding Flaw

The starting point here is not new. The paper said as much already[1]. Article B1.8.6 of the 2026 Regulations gives Race Control absolute discretion over whether a driver should hand back an advantage gained by leaving the track[2]. The paper had already flagged how the shift from 2025 to 2026 widened, rather than narrowed, that discretion, from the activation of active aerodynamics to the grid formation rules following a cancelled qualifying session at the season opener. Its conclusion, written before a single lap of the championship had been run, was blunt: the only area where absolute discretion is genuinely justified is safety. Everywhere else, applying the regulations risks depending on whichever steward is on duty rather than on verifiable standards. Just a week earlier, during the Austrian weekend, Russell's pole position was decided by just twenty-seven thousandths of a second, while Sainz's retirement was handled with a Virtual Safety Car alone. This demonstrated the same discrepancy, with one rule applied to one driver and another to the next, within the same race weekend[3].

 

Silverstone

Today at Silverstone, the problem resurfaced in a different form. On lap 48 of 52, Max Verstappen lost control of his Red Bull exiting Stowe Corner, ending up in the gravel trap while running in third place. Race Control correctly called a full Safety Car rather than a Virtual one because marshals needed to reach the stricken car and heavy recovery equipment had to be brought onto the track. This is exactly what Article B5.13 states should happen, and this was not done when Sainz retired a week earlier. So far, the rules have been applied coherently. The critical moment came afterwards, when the message was displayed that the Safety Car would come in on the penultimate lap, setting up a final racing lap. However, this decision was reversed moments later and the race finished under a neutralisation, amid boos from the record weekend crowd of 564,000. Charles Leclerc took the win, ahead of George Russell — who overtook Lewis Hamilton at the pit exit during the Safety Car period — and Hamilton himself in third place. The Federation later explained that a technical fault had triggered the erroneous “Safety Car in this lap” message, but that explanation did not address why, once Verstappen's car had already been recovered, officials chose to wait before starting the unlapping procedure.

That same afternoon, an apparently unrelated episode told the same story of fragility. On lap 44, Kimi Antonelli ran off at Turn 6, Brooklands, with a clear mechanical problem affecting his left-front wheel: his fourth track limits infringement of the race, a standard five-second penalty, dropping him from ninth to sixteenth. The stewards accepted that the mechanical failure had occurred, yet ruled that it did not amount to a “justifiable reason for leaving the track”[4], under the very same Article B1.8.6 cited earlier. Antonelli gained not a single metre from those excursions but, given the complete absence of any clear definition of “justifiable reason”, a driver with an evident mechanical problem still ended up penalised, even though it is hard to imagine a more reasonable excuse for running off than a genuine technical failure; the standard penalty applied regardless, precisely because deciding what counts as “justifiable” remains, here too, a matter for whichever stewards happen to be sitting that day.

 

The Procedural Gap

None of this was unpredictable. The paper warned precisely about this kind of gap: discretion without verifiable parameters does not necessarily produce inequity, but it makes such inequity structurally possible at every race. At Silverstone it became clear that the regulations prescribe no objective criteria here. The result is that the same set of circumstances, a car to recover, few laps remaining, can end in one last real racing lap or in a neutralised finish, depending on how Race Control reads the moment. This is not an isolated case. Back in 2022, recovering Daniel Ricciardo's McLaren, the Italian Grand Prix also finished behind the Safety Car, with the Federation stating that the safety of the recovery operation was its only priority[5], adding that the timing of the Safety Car had no bearing on the procedure. The safety principle behind that decision is legitimate. The problem is that, four years on, the same principle still rests on a case-by-case judgement rather than a written protocol.

 

Conclusion

Incidents like the one at Silverstone do not suggest negligence on the part of the Federation. They confirm the argument made before the 2026 season began that discretion, when not anchored to verifiable thresholds and protocols, stops being a safety tool and becomes an unpredictable variable for fans, teams and drivers alike. The answer is not to restrict Race Control's ability to manoeuvre, which is essential in genuine emergencies where every second counts, but rather to confine it to uniform criteria for the standard application of the rules, flags, the Virtual Safety Car, Safety Car restarts and penalties. Full discretion should be reserved only for situations where the physical safety of drivers and marshals is genuinely at risk. Until this distinction is clearly set out in the Sporting Regulations, Formula 1 will continue to discover, race after race, that the answer was right in front of them all along.

---

[1]D. Beatrice, M. Ferrer, A. A. Mandal, A comprehensive comparison between 2024, 2025 and 2026 F1 Sporting Regulations, ISDE Law and Business School, Barcelona.

[2]Art. B1.8.6, FIA, 2026 F1 Driving Standards Guidelines, v01, 26th February 2026.

[3]D. Beatrice, The Cost of Discretion: Lessons from the F1 Austrian Grand Prix, 2026.

[4]FIA Stewards, Doc. 77, 2026 Formula 1 British Grand Prix.

[5]FIA explain decision to end Italian Grand Prix behind Safety Car, Formula1.com, 2022.