Why F1's stewards can never be right

My cats aren't on Twitter.

Neither are they capable of writing a coherent sentence (mind you, the same could be said of many people who are on social media). But as surely as eggs don't bounce, were they possessed of those facilities they'd have deployed them in the immediate aftermath of the Canadian and Austrian Grands Prix to promulgate their angst about the state of Formula 1 stewarding.

After all, everybody else was getting in on the act.

(Parenthetically, how many people who dash off angry letters and emails to specialist magazines, splenetically declaring Formula 1 to be dead to them and that they will never watch another grand prix - and, indeed, they hereby cancel their subscription - actually follow through? Or do they wake up the next morning consumed with regret, fist clenched in mouth, wishing they could recall the fulminating epistle unread? Something along these lines is, presumably, the daily ritual of whoever runs Rich Energy's Twitter account. But I digress.)

While there was a predictable split along the faultlines of fandom - those who self-identify as 'Team LH' generally weren't too dischuffed about the penalty that handed their man victory in Canada - a good number of neutrals were also moved to fury.

Their view was that the rules are being enforced pedantically and to the detriment of the spectacle.

That Max Verstappen was permitted to keep his win at the Red Bull Ring came as lukewarm comfort to those who thought his late-race tussle with Charles Leclerc barely merited investigation, let alone three hours of radio silence between the chequered flag and the verdict.

"Just let them race" - isn't that what the FIA has supposedly been trying to do since it first mooted that policy at the beginning of the 2017 season?

But although 'let them race' trips neatly off the tongue, transforming it from a meaningless platitude into a coherent policy acceptable to all F1's stakeholders is a near-impossible feat.

A summit between the drivers and the stewards the Friday before this year's Bahrain Grand Prix produced positive noises, but no firm consensus.

"We told them we weren't going to change anything overnight, we were there to get input," said the chairman of the Bahrain stewards, Garry Connelly.

"There are probably three or four major points that we'll take out of it. I guess you can sum it up by saying they want to be allowed to race, but they want it to be safe and fair."

And there's the problem. What, precisely, is 'fair'? An utterly exacting interpretation of the rules as written, or some kind of softening of the edges - a 'fudge factor' - in which minor misdemeanours are overlooked for the good of the race?

Ultimately neither of these philosophies will satisfy all of the people all of the time.

Let's not forget that the FIA enforces its international sporting code, as well as the specific rules relating to F1, in order to be seen to be 'fair'.

Cast your minds back to the pre-Jean Todt era and there were plenty of examples in which the governing body was perceived to be meddling arbitrarily and heavy-handedly with results in order to punish those competitors who didn't rub along nicely with Max Mosley.

The prime case study for this is the 2008 Belgian Grand Prix, in which Lewis Hamilton short-cut the Bus Stop chicane during the course of trying to pass Kimi Raikkonen, for which he was given a 25-second penalty after winning the race on the road.

The aftermath took several farcical turns - some of them in court - and no less an eminence than Niki Lauda called for the introduction of permanent race stewards to avoid a repeat of "the worst decision ever".

It's because of events such as this that we now have a more disciplined and heavily scrutinised roster of stewards, which includes experienced ex-drivers, all of whom are charged with enforcing the rules to the letter. Fans and competitors alike demanded that it be so.

Over the past couple of weeks, some of my colleagues have discoursed eloquently on the subject of how the present state of F1 - pretty processional, outliers such as Austria apart - has come about through rulemakers caving in to popular demand for change.

McLaren team boss Andreas Seidl has also pointed out that if F1 is indeed "over-regulated", as Red Bull's Christian Horner fulminated, then it is so because teams and drivers are constantly pushing for rules and clarifications to clear up every grey area.

Unintended consequences await every well-intentioned but knee-jerk change to the regulations.

A key consequence is delay. Every additional clause in the rulebook adds inertia and tardiness to stewarding deliberations.

A glance sideways at how other sports have tried to remove human error from the decision-making process is instructive. In tennis, for instance, while the accuracy of the Hawk-Eye system remains disputed (some research claims a 10mm margin of error), its deployment adds to rather than detracting from the spectacle: players can challenge as many umpiring decisions as they want but if Hawk-Eye finds against them three times, that's it until the next set.

Most importantly, the system delivers its finding almost instantaneously, minimising disruption to the flow of the game.

In rugby, though, the use of the Television Match Official is subject to the on-field referee's call. So while the better referees maintain a continuous dialogue with the TMO to monitor minor infringements, calls involving marginal tries or significant foul play can be interminable, involving slow-motion replays over multiple angles.

Or they might never be referred 'upstairs' at all, because some referees think they know better.

There's also the matter of whether certain instances of foul play look 'worse' in slo-mo; here there's a clear link to the stewards' deliberations in Canada, where slow-motion replays of Vettel's steering movements proved damning.

In football, popular outrage over disallowed goals led to the grudging implementation of the Video Assistant Referee.

Business proceeded relatively well until it began to deliver its own unpopular verdicts.

How many of those people chanting "Fuck VAR" in the terraces of the Estadio Afonso Henriques last month, when England lost to Switzerland after Callum Wilson's goal was chalked off, were responsible for the kind of bleatings, chafings and social media rantings that led to VAR being implemented in the first place?

The lesson here is demand change if you want - just be prepared to wear the consequences.

By-the-book rigour or fudge factor: pick one...