FIA wanted Whiting as judge

"We tried a permanent steward early in my time as FIA president," Max Mosley explained, "and the feeling was that there was just too much intimacy between him and the teams."

The man in question was former Lotus team boss Peter Warr and certain areas of the paddock felt that Warr's close relationship with former Lotus driver Ayrton Senna made his selection inappropriate in terms of impartial decision-making.

"It's very difficult," Mosley admitted. "One opinion says have permanent stewards. But if you do that, they become part of the circus, they get to know everyone and they have friends and enemies. We feel that it is important to have independent people.

"A compromise solution we put, that was not accepted by the teams, is that penalties should be imposed by Charlie Whiting, with a right of appeal to the stewards. I'm sure that nobody in the paddock would question Charlie's impartiality and if you did that you would get more consistency, together with a safeguard, but the F1 Commission argued against it."

Frank Williams, however, commented: "Charlie's job is to make instant decisions, nearly all of them correct, and if he has an additional judiciary responsibility, he will get less correct."