At the 2022 Japanese Grand Prix, Max Verstappen clinched his second world championship after a commanding performance in the wet. A fairytale ending it should’ve been; the only problem was, nobody knew he had won.

It was just another one of a long list of instances where the FIA have made themselves look foolish, applied the rules in a perplexing way and made a mockery of the pinnacle of motorsport.

In Japan, the sporting regulations were interpreted in a way they never had been before in that after the resumption of a race – regardless of the elapsed time – full points should be awarded. The only problem was nobody realised this.

The important duty of telling the new champion he’d won did not fall to his team, to an FIA official nor to a competitor but to former driver and TV presenter Johnny Herbert who left a bewildered Max unsure as to whether he had actually won.

This means that two consecutive championships have been decided in a such a way that implicates the FIA somehow and neither of them particularly positively. We don’t need to relive the madness that was Abu Dhabi but let’s just say it wasn’t the FIA’s best day.

Throughout this season, despite the restructuring, there have been too many displays of incompetence from motorsport’s governing body: inconsistent track limit management, the utter confusion that the grid penalty system, the piercings debacle and the tractor on track that could’ve led to tragedy.

In recent years, Formula One has grown in popularity and that brings more scrutiny on the decisions made by the FIA. This means they need to make justifiable choices about what they do with the sport but you can’t really say they have.

One week they’ll be as stringent as you like about something (track limits for example) and then it’ll be completely forgotten, then they will take (correctly) a stance on safety issues such as the piercings yet completely ignore a vehicle on track.

The FIA have no consistency and also don’t seem to have any accountability: if you are investigating yourself then you aren’t doing a proper investigation. Something needs to change in the governing in Formula One and it needs to change quickly, we can’t have this scenario where the governing body is the laughing stock of the sport.

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