The review into the events of the controversy which surrounded the end of the last race of the 2021 season, while the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix is not due until early March. However, the F1 is already proposing a new structure around how races are managed in future.
There is widespread acceptance within the sport that race director Michael Masi failed to follow the rules correctly during a late safety car, and that those mistakes had a decisive impact on the outcome of the Drivers’ Championship, allowing Max Verstappen to deny Lewis Hamilton on the last lap of the race.
His misapplication of the regulations, inadvertent though it may have been, caused F1 damage by causing its fairness and transparency to be questioned.
It might have robbed F1 of its biggest star. It is still not clear whether Hamilton, reported to be highly disillusioned after being robbed, in his eyes – and of many others – of an eighth world title, will even return to the grid this year.
A support structure is now being planned for the race director, with a barrier introduced between him and the teams to prevent the direct lobbying over the radio that was such a feature of the 2021 campaign.
And revisions to the roles, training, and responsibilities of the race stewards, who decide on breaches of the rules and the resulting sanctions, and who are independent of the race director are also under consideration.
That may lead to the introduction of a full-time panel of stewards who will adjudicate on every race, rather than being picked on an ad-hoc basis as is currently the case.
The fate of Masi himself is still undecided. However, a number of insiders believe he cannot credibly stay in place after what happened in Abu Dhabi. Elsewhere, there are separate reports that Hamilton will only consider returning to the sport if Masi is not in situ.
It seems increasingly likely that a new race director will be installed for 2022, but they can count on much more robust support mechanisms around him than were provided to Masi.