How F1 should clamp down on driving standards

News that Formula 1's stewards will be more lenient and only apply penalties to drivers egregiously at fault for causing collisions is good, right? After all, who doesn't want to see great racing, with the high risk of penalties not acting as a disincentive to attempting a crowd-pleasing overtake?

In isolation this sounds like a positive step. But we've been here before, and while similar plans in the past have had a small impact, the need for repeated attempts to tackle this issue proves it's not as easy to do as it sounds.

Remember this story from June 2014, with the FIA planning to 'ease back on driving standards investigations'? That was a good thing too. There was also discussion of exactly the same thing 14 months before that. Quite the recurring theme.

The principle is entirely logical. If one driver blatantly shoves another off the road, launches a move that's never close to coming off or makes an error so cack-handed as to be inexcusable, they should be punished. This isn't a dodgem-car driver's charter.

The wording of the modified regulation goes a little further than that, stating 'unless it is clear to the stewards that a driver was wholly or predominantly to blame for an incident, no penalty will be imposed'.

So that also covers incidents where a tiny error, let's say an unexpected lock-up triggered by hitting an unfamiliar bump off the racing line, could also be punished.

It would be preferable to see such tiny mistakes also being forgiven, no matter how frustrating it is to the victim. But this is the path that's been chosen and it's a perfectly acceptable one. The trouble is what happens when it comes to being implemented.

The word 'predominantly' is the tricky one. The question is where exactly the line should be drawn. Is it at 90/10, 80/20, 60/40?

Even the word 'wholly', while in most cases very clear, has its problems. It sounds straightforward enough - if the victim of another driver's actions was going about their business in a normal way and was hit, then they are not remotely responsible. But what about if the victim might have had the chance to prevent an accident by jumping out of the way?

Clearly, whichever way you look at that it's dangerous. If you decide the victim should take whatever action to prevent the collision given the chance, the wording of that rule could be taken to mean that they have a share in what happens. Then it's a question of when 'predominantly' comes in. And does that not just give the reckless driver carte blanche to expect rivals to jump out of the way?

Come to mention it, what's the point in having the word 'predominantly' in that regulation? It's like saying 'unless a number is 50 or anything more than 30' - both cover the same eventuality.

A lack of precision is the breeding ground of ambiguity. Often, it depends on perspective, and that's at the heart of F1's stewarding problem.

None of the above is a problem if the rules are applied in the same way week in, week out. That's why what is always demanded from referees in all sports is consistency.

This is where one extraordinary shortcoming of F1 leaves it out of step with many other major international sports.

In 2001, referees became professional in English football's Premier League. A year later, cricket's international Elite Panel of Cricket Umpires was created. These are just two examples of the progression towards top-class, formalised, professional officiating in international sports.

Yet today, a decade-and-a-half on from this wave of change, Formula 1's stewards remain unpaid. Save for expenses being covered, it's an amateur process. It's one of the relics of the old days of amateurism that persists in this more professional age.

There are several reasons for doing this, including the fact that positions like this tend to have a cachet as honorary roles to the point where there is even a risk of appointments being made for political reasons. That is not a pathway to ensuring the best possible people for the job are appointed.

So once you reach the conclusion that you want the best-qualified people for the job, you need to make the role fully professional to get them week in, week out.

This is also the best way to improve consistency. If it's the same bunch of four judges for every race, or at the very least four from a pool of six or seven - rather than the current vast pool of options - the body of knowledge, experience and context available to the stewards will be enormous.

This will also allow F1 to capitalise on one big advantage it has over many other sports. For example, in football the desire for consistency is limited by human vision and circumstances. A referee has one look at what happens, in real time, often from a poor angle and sometimes while trying to pay attention to something else happening on the field.

As Derek Warwick, who makes regular appearances as the F1 ex-driver steward, recently pointed out, stewards get a huge amount of information to base their decisions on. And they have time, so theoretically that consistency should be achievable.

While there are always grey areas, and there has to be a line between an offence that is penalised and one that isn't that can make two very similar incidents have a different reaction, it should be possible to dial out most of the inconsistency.

That's not to say that stewarding to date has been bad, and all too often the criticisms of wild inconsistency are used by people to support favourite drivers. There's no denying that many of the individuals who currently act as stewards are extremely skilled, conscientious and disciplined.

But the stewarding system is improvable and this is the single most obvious way to do so - by allowing quality people to dedicate their time to it.

There's no reason why these could not be full-time roles. After all, if you attend all 20 grands prix in a season, with a travel day allowed either side, that's immediately 100 days of work. And, realistically, often they will be required for another day surrounding the race weekend.

Then, add the fact that it would make sense for them to attend the tests, which could include a proper conference with drivers pre-season to lay out the way penalties are interpreted and review past incidents.

As well as the gains in consistency and the specialism of the stewards, it would ensure the drivers know where they stand and also create an ongoing relationship between them and the officials.

But the benefit can stretch far beyond even that. As part of their job, these full-time stewards will be able to dedicate time to working on improving the regulations and also engaging with other racing categories both to create a trickle-down effect on stewarding standards and to get feedback and ideas from other forms of motorsport.

The only real downside is the cost. Currently, stewards are not exactly cheap as they are paid travel and living expenses. So a salary on top of that spend will be expensive. But relative to the amount of money washing around in F1 (a total revenue of $1.7billion) it shouldn't be hard to make this possible.

Even if the FIA can't foot the bill within its current budget, F1 needs to find a way to make this possible.

How often do we hear teams and drivers complaining about decisions? That shows how important it is to them; after all, race wins and world championships are at stake. Improving the standards of stewarding with a full-time professional panel would not eradicate all disagreements, but it would make the whole process far more accurate, easy to understand and reliable.

The stakes are high indeed. Stewards are told to bear in mind that their decisions should hold up in a court of law, such is the risk of legal action. Another advantage of a regular panel is they may be willing to make the right decision when it's very close to the line, rather than conservatism being engineered in.

Stewarding is always going to be an inexact science. No two incidents are identical, especially with the amount of data that can be analysed to interpret what happened, so there will inevitably be room for argument. Interpretation is key, and the quality of that will be improved through experience.

So it's only by bringing stewarding into the 21st century, like many other major sports, can F1 hope to deliver on its laudable (and repeated) attempts to strike the right balance between letting the show go on and correctly policing it.

F1 is supposed to set the bar high in everything it does. It's time for stewarding to be performed to the same professional standards, rather than grand prix racing continuing in this circle of loosening up the rules to encourage racing, then tightening them again amid driver complaints.