After months of farce and fury, Formula 1 finally calls time on Michael Masi

“No Michael, no! That was so not right!”

Those were the words Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff bellowed over the radio to Michael Masi at the end of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in December as Max Verstappen drove across the line to take his maiden Formula 1 world championship. Now, it seems, the FIA finally agrees.

Masi has been removed from his position as race director by new FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem in a move which the motorsport governing body hopes can help bury an almighty controversy in the past for good. The Australian’s unprecedented interpretation of the safety car rules at Yas Marina, which rendered race leader Lewis Hamilton a sitting duck and essentially gifted the title to Verstappen, led to Mercedes protesting the race results and almost saw a legal case brought before the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Masi’s call to allow only the cars separating the two title contenders to un-lap themselves unleashed an enormous wave of fury from fans, pundits and fellow drivers alike, and led the FIA to conduct an investigation into a decision it admitted had “tarnished” the reputation of F1.

That it took more than two months for the guillotine dangling over Masi’s head to fall can in part be attributed to the sheer level of administration involved in putting the FIA’s new plan — comprising two new race directors, Eduardo Freitas and Niels Wittich, as well a new virtual control room — in place. But the FIA will also have spent the weeks following the Abu Dhabi debacle wondering how to play the PR game. After all, the governing body has needed to somehow try and balance a variety of conflicting factors, including making its changes, pacifying Wolff, Hamilton, and Mercedes, and ensuring that Verstappen’s title is not made to look illegitimate.

Now that Masi’s ousting/demotion — or whatever the correct label is to describe his “being offered another position with the FIA” — has finally been confirmed, the FIA is making a clear admittance that the decision he took in Abu Dhabi was an error, and a highly damaging one at that. It also appears an indication that Hamilton should indeed have taken his eighth title had the rulebook been correctly implemented, and the fact that the FIA published its decision at the same time as Ferrari were launching their new car for the 2022 campaign only emphasises their desire to brush things under the carpet as quickly and quietly as possible.

Furthermore, Masi’s removal is no doubt partly why Mercedes have strongly hinted that Hamilton will return to the grid for 2022, after speculation he may have been so disillusioned that he could call it quits.

A late decision is better than no decision, but the timing means both Freitas and Wittich have very little time to prepare for their new role, and their hiring in the first place is testament to just how badly wrong it can go for a man who is not fully up to speed with the regulations.

“That’s what we call motor racing,” Masi informed Wolff after Verstappen had taken the title in Abu Dhabi. “We went car racing.” After two months of farce, fury, and F1 politicking, Michael Masi won’t be telling anybody how to go car racing anymore.