Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. But has it ever been what it used to be?
Complaints about the interpretation and implementation of F1’s ‘Driving Standards Guidelines’ have intensified even as the document enshrining them has thickened in response with caveats and clarifications. In tandem with this phenomenon there has developed a widespread longing for a halcyon era in which race control carried such authority that competitors simply tugged their forelocks and accepted its decisions without question.
At the penultimate round of last season a summit was held between the drivers and the FIA in response to mounting criticism of the guidelines, which establish when a competitor is entitled to ‘racing room’ when passing or being passed. The digested read of the findings was that both parties had a “frank, open and collegial” dialogue while reviewing five key incidents from the 2025 season, but that there would be no immediate change to the guidelines.
Beyond that they continued to agree to disagree over who should pay for the permanent professional stewards the drivers have been demanding for so long.
Besides the matter of who picks up the tab, the key fault line between the drivers and the governing body is a fundamental one: the drivers believe the guidelines are too complicated and open to exploitation – and that adding clarifications detracts rather than adding to their usefulness.
“It is almost like you’re driving and you go into a corner and there is a rule book of this, this and this – that is not really racing in my head,” said Alex Albon on the eve of that meeting in Qatar.
“That is almost like we have a scenario for a rule and then we have another rule that explains the loopholes of the first rule. And then there are layers to the rules and it makes it complicated.
“As drivers we have grown up karting, doing Formula 4, Formula 3, Formula 2. We know what is on the edge, we know what is clean driving, what is dirty driving. I kind of abide by my own version of what is clean and what is not. And to me it makes sense.
“I think back in the days when there were fewer rules, it was more flow, kind of fewer question marks. Tell me if I’m wrong, but I think it was more like Charlie [Whiting] would say his version of the incident and everyone kind of just said okay and moved on.”
This citation of the Charlie Whiting era is fascinating, and not just because it predates Albon’s F1 debut – Whiting died shortly before the 2019 Australian Grand Prix, Albon’s first race with Toro Rosso, as Red Bull’s development team was known back then.
Whiting commanded the respect of the competitors in a way his successors, frankly, haven’t. Chiefly this was a factor of his stature and experience within motor racing, as well as his position within the Bernie Ecclestone-Max Mosley milieu which exercised more or less total control over F1 during the boom years of the 1990s onwards.
He was the epitome of the poacher-turned-gamekeeper, having been chief mechanic to Nelson Piquet at Bernie Ecclestone’s Brabham team at the turn of the 1980s, an age when ‘bending’ the rules was rife. When Ecclestone divested himself of that team in 1988 to Swiss financier Joachim Luthi, Bernie saved Whiting from the wreckage that was to come by finding him a job at the FIA.
In the years to come, Whiting’s portfolio expanded from technical delegate to encompass overall race direction, including hands-on operation of the start procedure, plus safety matters and the signing-off of new tracks. It was a powerful combination of experience: having worked as a mechanic he had an encyclopaedic command of drivers’ excuses and their capacity for dissembling; and he had a deep understanding of the physics of racing.
On top of that, he had the implicit backing of the most powerful people in motor racing. Even Jean Todt, who spent much of the first few months of his time as FIA president getting rid of Mosley appointees in favour of his own, kept Whiting in the fold.
For the most part Whiting eschewed publicity, kept his opinions to himself, and seldom gave interviews. Knowing this deepened the bond of respect between him and the drivers.
But is there anyone in the current motor racing firmament who enjoys this kind of stature? With the greatest respect to the likes of drivers-turned-pundits Karun Chandhok, Anthony Davidson and Jolyon Palmer, who have been singled out for praise (albeit in tongue-in-cheek fashion) by Carlos Sainz for their level-headed assessment of recent incidents, probably not.
Even if there were some talismanic figure who could be parachuted in to preside without questions from the floor over any or all matters of on-track etiquette, would they be right all the time? And would the forelocks still be tugged? Unlikely in an era with a larger and more polarised audience, and larger sums of money involved in the outcome.
It would also be wise to slip off the rose-tinted optics and interrogate the past less romantically. Whiting often came under fire in the final decade of his reign, particularly in 2016, when tensions built over the perceived inconsistency of various race control and stewarding calls – to the point where Sebastian Vettel furiously instructed his engineer to “Tell Charlie to fuck off” during the Mexican GP.
People often say things were “Better back then”. But better back when?
Then as now, calls from race control and the stewards’ room were necessarily subjective, their accuracy dependent on the experience of the characters involved. What the current driving standards guidelines document does is attempt to establish in print, and in a transparent fashion, what the expectations are.
F1 is now more of a business than ever before, with teams approaching valuations in the billions of dollars. The commercial rights holder is also a billion-dollar business with shareholders to appease and regulatory compliance niceties to observe. F1’s days of doing business opaquely with handshakes and quiet words are over, as evinced by Liberty Media escorting Ecclestone out via the revolving door as soon as humanly possible after acquiring the rights.
Likewise, judgement calls which shape the outcome of a race cannot be arrived at by invisible, unaccountable figures working within some impenetrable ziggurat. As the driving standards document points out via selective capitals, “These are GUIDELINES NOT REGULATIONS”, they acknowledge “many incidents require subjective judgement”, and that “racing is a dynamic process”.
They may be unwieldy, and becoming ever more so, but their function is to set out the rules of engagement as transparently as possible. The problem is that it’s impossible to create a one-size-fits-all phrasing.
As Whiting well knew, drivers are like children and will test the boundaries of any rulemaker. Hence the original test within the guidelines about where each driver’s front axle happened to be at the apex of a corner had to be laden with nuance in subsequent iterations.
But grey areas remain, especially when judging other crucial ‘tests’ such as whether a driver is in control of their car or not. In Brazil, Oscar Piastri was penalised even though the changing camber of the track at the apex of Turn 1 contributed to his loss of control and the subsequent impact with Andrea Kimi Antonelli. Other competitors spoke up in support of Piastri but F1 is not a democracy.
It’s understood that in the discussion between the drivers and the FIA about the guidelines, one of the main topics was the need for the stewards to factor the dynamics of locking up into their thinking. For instance, if a driver locks wheels while trying to avoid an accident set in motion by the movements of the car ahead, should they be deemed at fault?
But this, of course, means more rather than fewer layers of nuance, and further drift from the principle of letting the drivers race.
If the drivers want streamlined, objective decision-making, they’re unlikely to find it through some shared definition of what is “clean” and what is “dirty” – because these terms are inherently subjective. Neither will they find a solution by looking to history – because things aren’t what they were, they’re what they are.
Having permanent, professional stewards with a recent background in F1 racing could imbue the interpretation of the guidelines with more respectability, but that is what cuts to the essence of the nostalgia for the Charlie Whiting era.
It’s not so much a question of rules or guidelines, but respect – and trust in those charged with enforcing them.
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