FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem is being investigated by the governing body for allegedly interfering in a penalty decision, according to a report.
Ben Sulayem is said to have attempted to overturn a post-race penalty given to Fernando Alonso at last year’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
The BBC claim the FIA’s compliance officer Paolo Basarri has submitted a report to its ethics committee stating a whistleblower made the claim against Ben Sulayem.
Alonso was given a 10-second time penalty for failing to serve an earlier penalty correctly. The stewards noted an Aston Martin team member touched his car with a jack while he was serving a five-second time penalty.
Aston Martin successfully petitioned the stewards to review and overturn their decision, after showing other occasions where teams had touched cars with jacks while serving similar penalties.
At the time the stewards “concluded that there was no clear agreement, as was suggested to the stewards previously, that could be relied upon to determine that parties had agreed that a jack touching a car would amount to working on the car.
“In the circumstances, we considered that our original decision to impose a penalty on car 14 [Alonso] needed to be reversed and we did so accordingly.”
The FIA has been approached for comment.
Under Ben Sulayem the sport’s governing body has made far-reaching efforts to improve its decision-making during grands prix. This followed the controversial end to the 2021 world championship, four days before Ben Sulayem’s election, in which FIA’s F1 race director incorrectly applied the rules in arranging a final-lap restart which swung the outcome of the title fight.
In reaction a new race director was appointed and other staff hired to reduce the burden on that individual. Revised regulations and clearer driving guidelines were also created, and a new Remote Operations Centre established to aid the work of those on-site at races.
This article will be updated
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