Mohammed Ben Sulayem will no longer be directly involved in F1

President of the FIA Mohammed Ben Sulayem has written to F1’s teams to announce that he will no longer take a direct involvement in the sport, following a string of controversies since he started the job back in December 2021.

However, he also claimed that the move had always been planned, having been elected on the back of a campaign promise to be a ‘non-executive president’ who would manage a team of, er, managers.

Still, the timing of the news is interesting, to say the least. Since New Year alone, Ben Sulayem has found himself in hot water for getting involved in a commercial matter - a $20bn Saudi bid to buy F1, which reports suggest never actually happened - and publicly supporting Andretti’s bid to join the grid with Cadillac despite strong opposition from some of the teams.

The existence of misogynistic comments on an archived version of his old website from 2001 also drew widespread criticism, and although the FIA said they do not reflect Ben Sulayem’s beliefs, the president himself still hasn’t responded to the matter personally.

Reports say that MBS’s letter confirms his restructuring process at the FIA “has now largely been completed”, leaving him free to "focus on strategic matters with my leadership team".

So although he’ll no longer manage F1 on a day-to-day basis - that job now falls to director of single-seater racing, Nikolas Tombazis, plus new CEO Natalie Robyn - he will still be able to influence top-level decision making.

Whether or not that will be enough to appease the teams and F1 itself remains to be seen…