Formula 1 Drivers Are Paying More Fines Than Ever, And They’re Not Happy About It
Drivers are complaining that the fines are unnecessary. The FIA says it has valid reasons for imposing them.
Drivers are complaining that the fines are unnecessary. The FIA says it has valid reasons for imposing them.
Formula 1’s governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, or FIA, has been taking heat from drivers for a few years now for its ways of penalizing them, including charging hefty monetary fines for seemingly small infractions.
The FIA has a strict set of rules and penalties it imposes on drivers for various infringements, right from causing collisions and driving recklessly to wearing jewellery and cursing during races and press conferences.
The drivers’ association is not pleased with these rules that are being imposed more frequently now than before. In 2024 alone, the FIA collected 260,000 euros in fines from drivers and teams, tripling their collection from past years.
Several drivers, however, disagree and maintain that not all of these penalties are required. During the Singapore Grand Prix last year, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen was ordered by the FIA to perform an act of “public interest” for using expletives to describe his car in a press conference.
Following this, the Grand Prix Drivers Association (GDPA) representing all drivers addressed the situation and asked to be treated like “adults” by the FIA and its President, Mohammed Ben Sulayem. “With regards to swearing, there is a difference between swearing intended to insult others and more casual swearing, such as you might use to describe bad weather, or indeed an inanimate object such as a Formula 1 car, or a driving situation,” the statement on Instagram read.
Apart from Verstappen, other drivers too have received penalties for swearing in press conferences in the form of monetary fines. Charles Leclerc was fined 5,000 euros for swearing in a press conference after the Mexican Grand Prix last year, despite apologizing immediately.
Other players too, have faced monetary fines for using inappropriate and sometimes offensive language.
The FIA however, insists that these rules are important. “We have to differentiate between our sport — motorsport — and rap music,” Ben Sulayem told motorsport.com in a statement last year. In a later statement on Instagram, he revealed that the FIA is taking the drivers’ feedback into consideration and looking to change rules related to swearing.
Here are some other major reasons why drivers were forced by the FIA to pay up:
Carlos Sainz was fined €20,000 because he showed up to the national anthem 5 seconds late in Suzuka. Sainz was reportedly having stomach issues which caused the delay in his arrival. His fine was reduced by €10,000 after a doctor verified that he had stomach problems.
He addressed the fine in a press interaction and said, "I think I am the biggest supporter of punctuality," and added, "...at the same time, I was 5 seconds late." He ended by saying, "I don't know if I'm going to get another fine for saying this, but shit happens."
(Video Source: YouTube/ESPN)
After a pit stop, a crew member left a cooling fan and dry ice on top of Albon's car, which he is then seen removing by himself outside the pit lane.
(Video Source: YouTube)
While speaking about trying to control his car during the race, Leclerc used "inappropriate language", and was fined despite apologizing immediately. He said, "Oh no, I don't want to join Max (Verstappen)", referring to the Red Bull driver's recent clash with the FIA for swearing during press interactions and facing community service for it.
(Video Source: YouTube/Pit Lane Banter)
Gasly received a fine after trying to leave a pit stop before all his tires were fitted. The team later received a fine too for not instructing the driver well enough.
(Video Source: YouTube)
Tsunoda was fined for being late to the national anthem before the race. Video shows him rushing to the track.
(Video Source: TikTok)
Perez and the team were fined for continuing the race after the car was crashed, leaving debris on the race track and risking the safety of other players. Red Bull asked Perez to continue to ensure that their other player, Max Verstappen, maintained the lead and was not disturbed by the deployment of a safety car. Video shows the back of Perez's car, with a damanged rear wing.
(Video Source: YouTube)
In general, the FIA has maintained that these fines are used for good. Nikolas Tombazis, another FIA official emphasized how fines are used to strengthen the sport’s grassroots movements and make the sport more accessible. “...all the money is spent on what is considered to be beneficial aspects, whether it is for safety, for grassroots in motorsport, or sometimes other projects which are to do with road safety.” he told motorsport.com.
Monetary fines, despite adding up to a lot, form only one part of the penalties the FIA imposes. Drivers and teams are subjected to penalties in different forms including time penalties, where extra seconds are added to their finishing time, or a position penalty, where drivers are forced to start the race from a lower grid position.
Other penalties include monetary fines, suspension of Super Licenses, which are special licenses issued to F1 drivers, or disqualification.
Drivers in general have demanded transparency in the process for imposing fines and other penalties. Mercedes driver George Russell, who is a vocal critic of the FIA’s current system, said, “For us when we were hearing from the FIA a couple of years ago, when they had the presidential elections, they were all about transparency.”
He added, "About where the money was going to be reinvested in terms of grassroots racing, which we are all in favour of. We just want the transparency, an understanding of what was promised from the beginning."
The data for this story comes from the FIA’s website and decision documents: href="https://www.fia.com/documents/championships/fia-formula-one-world-championship-14/season/season-2024-2043" target="_blank">FIA 2024 decisions
The decision documents are PDFs released for every separate ruling or update provided by the FIA, segregated according to the Grand Prix and year. The website has multiple dropdown menus and multiple PDFs within each dropdown for every decision they have put out.
I began by using Playwright to first click on each Grand Prix’s dropdown menu one by one and identify the PDFs. I looped through each dropdown and made a comprehensive list of all PDFs put out by the FIA in 2024. I set up another loop to download the PDFs and store them in one folder on my computer.
After this, I used Jonathan Soma’s Natural PDF , a library built on top of PDF Plumber, to scrape each document. Every PDF had a different structure, and I did not need all of them: for example, there were some documents that just announced grid placements or ordered players to appear before stewards. I did not require those, I only wanted documents that had decisions regarding penalties.
So I set up the scraper in a way where it loops through every PDF, looks for the text ‘No / Driver’ in it, and if the text exists, it then scrapes that PDF and skips the rest. I chose the ‘No / Driver’ text because all documents related to penalties started with this text.
While scraping the PDFs, I also appended every extracted element to a dictionary that had keys such as the date of penalty, driver’s name, competitor name, fine amount, reason, fact, etc.
I repeated the same process for all years from 2019–2024 to calculate whether the FIA had increased its collections of fines over the years.
For penalties other than fines, I created four main categories that I believe were representative of all the types of penalties players received:
I had a few other less significant categories such as ‘Warnings’, which included reprimands, and ‘No Further Action’, where a player had an infringement but was not penalized. A very small number of stray penalties were categorized as ‘Other’. I did not include these in my analysis because I wanted to focus on penalties that had some impact on a player’s race.
The data also does not include fines levied only on a Competitor (such as Mercedes, McLaren) and not a player because these were very few in number and difficult to incorporate or detect in my scraper.