Masi explains late decisions: 'Mercedes presented 2.5 hours'

The stewards have been quite slow in coming out with their decisions lately. According to Michael Masi, that's not surprising, now that teams, drivers and also journalists have a greater need for clarity.

F1 teams take time

In the past, Formula 1 sometimes drew a line too fast. A decision was made and people had to make do with it. Masi points this out, now that questions are being asked why decisions take so long. According to Masi, it is because he wants to give a detailed explanation on behalf of the FIA and the stewards.

''The stewards try and write their decision and they put that level of detail into them, and it takes time, to draft, rewrite etc. We can have decisions, and that’s one part. You have to draft it first and then adjust it again. The other part is the teams need to be given the opportunity to present their case. As an example, last weekend in Brazil, effectively in total over the two days, Mercedes was presenting to the stewards for about 2.5 hours'', says Masi according to Motorsportweek.com.

Did the decision come too late?

In Qatar, it also took a long time before certain decisions were made. Max Verstappen only heard after the first free practice that he would not receive a grid penalty for the Brazilian incident and less than two hours before the start of the race that he would receive a penalty for continuing to drive under yellow flags in qualifying. Masi remains of the opinion that that decision was not too late.

''You look at where the cars were on track, go through and have a look at all of the footage of every single car in the top 10, which is what I did. Then you look at the data and so forth, obviously it is time-consuming, and you want to make sure of what you’ve all got, so once we’ve finally got to it, determined who had done what and what was displayed and what wasn’t displayed and so forth we then reported those to the stewards and they sent out the summons'', concludes the Formula One race director.