The FIA president, Mohammed ben Sulayem, has announced he is to step back from direct involvement with Formula One.
The governing body’s relationship with F1’s owners Liberty Media has been increasingly fractious since Ben Sulayem took over as FIA president in December 2021 and a series of controversies have marked the opening year of his tenure.
Ben Sulayem wrote to the 10 F1 teams on Monday stating he would be moving away from a role dealing with F1, with the single-seater director, Nikolas Tombazis, taking over the hands-on management of the FIA’s involvement as F1’s regulator.
The 61-year-old Ben Sulayem said it had always been his aim to take a strategic role away from day to day management, telling the teams it was his “stated objective to be a non-executive president via the recruitment of a team of professional managers”, a task he said has “now largely been completed”.
However the move comes when dissatisfaction with his governance has been widespread and vociferous. F1 management recently issued a cease and desist letter when he posted on Twitter that an alleged £20bn Saudi Arabian bid for the sport seriously overvalued it. The Guardian understands there was no such bid but F1 were angry that the president was interfering in commercial issues over which the FIA has no remit.
The FIA’s recent ban on drivers making political statements at races, reportedly led by Ben Sulayem, has also been attacked by drivers, teams and F1, with the sport’s CEO Stefano Domenicali saying on Tuesday that he fully backed drivers’ rights to express themselves. Last week an archived version of the president’s former website also came to light that quoted the Emirati making misogynist comments.
These most recent issues were preceded by what was seen as an unnecessary enforcement of the rule about drivers wearing jewellery and angering teams and F1 in 2022 by blocking the adoption of six sprint races for this season in what was perceived to be an attempt to extract greater financial return from the commercial rights holder.
The FIA has stated Ben Sulayem’s decision to step back was in line with what he had planned on taking the post, as indicated by the appointment of Natalie Rincon as the new chief executive officer.
“The President’s manifesto clearly set out this plan before he was elected,” an FIA spokesperson said. “It pledged ‘the appointment of an FIA CEO to provide an integrated and aligned operation,’ as well as to ‘introduce a revised governance framework’ under ‘a leadership team focused on transparency, democracy, and growth. These goals, as well as the announcement of the new structure of the Single-Seater Department, have been planned since the beginning of this Presidency.”
