Why dropping Herbert from the F1 stewarding roster doesn’t solve a fundamental problem

Won’t somebody think of the poor volunteers?

Nobody has chafed so publicly about the absurdity and iniquity of relying on unpaid officials to do the FIA’s heavy lifting than its president, Mohammed Ben Sulayem. Indeed, last year he announced the formation of a new ‘officials department’ to instill professionalism in the next generation of sports officials.

In this sentiment, he was backed up by FIA single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis, who recently told Autosport, “It’s probably getting a bit unfair to just rely on people to do it out of their good heart, and that’s what we have now.

“We want to go to a more professional body in the future. That’s not to exclude volunteers, but it’s to have a body that can spend the Monday morning after a race analysing every single decision, making sure it was reached correctly, seeing what could be improved, etc.”

Laudable though this is, in racing’s here-and-now stewarding is an unpaid, expenses-only proposition (and those expenses probably don’t stretch as far as wine from near the bottom of the list). For those poor benighted stewards placing their heads in the proverbial lion’s mouth of Formula 1, this entails striking off a week of their lives in service of a pursuit in which it’s impossible to get every decision right.

Not only that, one has to contend with the inevitable high-profile consequences: being targeted for abuse by people who should know better leading on people who don’t. By this, I refer to those team principals who disingenuously huff and puff through their dog whistles to trigger the nattering nabobs of toxic fandom.

One official who has declared themselves done with the whole shebang told an Autosport colleague that there was only one equivalent (ie unpaid) job that is harder: refereeing a school football match with all the ghastly parents braying and hee-hawing from the touchlines and threatening to flush your head down the toilet.

Johnny Herbert

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images

With this in mind, it seems a trifle peculiar on the one hand to play the smallest violin in the world for the unpaid volunteers, and on the other to drop one from the roster for having the temerity to have a paid ‘side hustle’. Autosport understands that the “incompatible” media role that prompted the FIA to evict Johnny Herbert from its pool of grand prix stewards was his paid partnership with the sports betting site Betsafe.

This is, it must be said, a grubby trade. In common with much of the online betting industry – including the likes of Paddypower, Bet 365 and William Hill – Betsafe is registered in Malta for the avoidance of paying the proper amount of corporation tax.

Such outfits routinely approach journalists and/or well-known media figures for content or comment with which to garnish their online offering or share via social media for greater reach, especially if it’s a spicy ‘hot take’.

It’s understood that the FIA president took a particularly dim view of Herbert commenting on stewarding decisions in his capacity as a pundit. Certainly, some might interpret this as at best tone deaf, at worst a conflict of interest – especially given Herbert’s presence as a steward at the Mexican Grand Prix where Max Verstappen was penalised twice.

Such decisions are guaranteed to cause shots to be fired, even if the people responsible for making the calls express their reasoning solely through the medium of the FIA’s official documentation. Venture an opinion about it in public and the situation escalates towards Defcon 1.

So, has Herbert been dropped because having a profile is fundamentally incompatible with acting as a steward? If so, we have a problem since ex-drivers axiomatically have a profile.

And if you dig back through the heaving drawers of this issue’s history, ex-drivers were sought out and recruited as stewards because contemporary drivers demanded it: only they, went the reasoning, properly understood the intricate dynamics of racing.

Antonio Liuzzi, FIA, and Carlos Sainz on the grid

Or is the real issue that an official expressing their personal opinion on a betting site isn’t a good look for the FIA?

If so, I respectfully suggest that this matter should have been taken up earlier – let’s say, around the end of last October – and nipped in the proverbial bud rather than becoming a focal point of a slow news week at the back end of January. Because the fundamental questions surrounding Herbert’s many hats haven’t changed between then and now.

At any point during the intervening period, it would have been simple to communicate sensible guidelines over what paid work is considered incompatible with voluntary stewarding. I realise, of course, that the president was busy playing ‘Spin The P45’ with various paid officials before the end of last season so perhaps this was the cause of the delay.

F1 stewarding presently resides in limbo. While the FIA is taking steps towards professionalising the officials, and the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association wants the stewarding panel to consist of paid professionals, the two bodies are at loggerheads over who has to dip into their pockets for this luxury.

Meanwhile, a fundamental truth goes seemingly unacknowledged: stewarding is now the subject of so much toxic sentiment that most sensible people wouldn’t do it even if you paid them.

Perhaps we should ask for volunteers? Oh…