FIA opens the books on penalty guidelines

“I don’t like how we’re racing at the moment,” Williams’ Alex Albon said ahead of the 2025 Austrian Grand Prix weekend — not a complaint about his team’s form as Formula One neared the halfway mark of the 2025 season, but a reaction to the racing guidelines documents the FIA published publicly for the first time.

The purpose of F1’s penalty and driving standard guidelines is to help stewards “with fair and consistent decision making,” with the latter document setting out the rules for wheel-to-wheel racing. Their publication arrives as the FIA faces calls for greater transparency and scrutiny of its officiating system, and just ahead of December’s FIA presidential election.

What are penalty points?

Penalty points are one of several punishments stewards can hand drivers for infractions ranging from safety car and virtual safety car breaches to causing a collision. The system was introduced at the start of the 2014 season, and once a driver accumulates 12 points within any 12-month span, they receive an automatic one-race ban. The slate is wiped clean after the ban is served, while points otherwise drop off a driver’s super licence once the 12-month mark of each infringement passes.

Heading into the 2025 Austrian Grand Prix weekend (June 27–29), Max Verstappen sat on 11 penalty points. Two were due to drop off his licence on June 30 — a year after he picked up two points for causing a collision with Lando Norris at the Red Bull Ring. Verstappen had already reached the brink of a ban at the 2025 Spanish Grand Prix.

The most recent driver to serve a ban for accumulating too many points in a 12-month window was Kevin Magnussen, sidelined at the 2024 Azerbaijan Grand Prix. “You get punished, and then you come back, and you’re all ready to… f— s— up now!” Magnussen joked on his return to the paddock at last year’s Singapore Grand Prix. “It’s funny how that works.”

How are the points determined?

Penalties rest with the discretion of the stewards, a rotating panel of volunteers from the motorsport world. Ahead of the Austrian GP weekend, the FIA made two documents public to aid “fair and consistent decision making”: the 2025 F1 Penalty Guidelines and the 2025 Driving Standard Guidelines.

The penalty guidelines cover around 100 common infringements and suggest penalties and points depending on whether an incident occurs in practice, qualifying or the grand prix. A key caveat: the listed points are “the Maximum Number of Penalty Points depending upon the severity of the infringement,” leaving final say to the stewards. Where an incident yields only a fine or reprimand, no points can be added. The FIA noted the points “are intended to be the norm for a particular offence” but that stewards “may vary these, taking into account mitigating or aggravating circumstances.”

Drivers push back

The structure means a driver can approach a race ban without a particularly dangerous maneuver. “We saw Kevin (Magnussen) last year get a race ban. Although it obviously helped me, I felt like he was really hard done by to have that race ban from all of these tiny infractions,” said Haas’ Ollie Bearman, who filled in for Magnussen. “At the end, he tries an overtake, and it doesn’t work. They both cut the corner. It’s no harm, no foul. Everyone keeps going, no dangerous maneuvers, no damage, and two penalty points. Those add up quickly, so it’s a shame.”

Bearman acknowledged “drivers need to be punished in some way to stop them from doing some things,” but Fernando Alonso drew a firmer line: penalty points should be reserved for dangerous driving, with mere mistakes — such as crossing the white line at a pit-lane exit — punished only by five-second or drive-through penalties. “When you are pushing someone into the grass in the middle of the straight, or when you are doing different things, that should be a penalty point, because it’s a dangerous driving,” the Aston Martin driver said.

Isack Hadjar and Pierre Gasly both said they dislike the points system, with Hadjar arguing “I think it’s very clean field. It’s not very needed.” Verstappen, asked whether he would change his approach after reaching the brink of a ban, replied: “You’re joking? Is this like a trap? I’m getting this question every single time, every weekend.”

Gasly, once himself in ban territory, said: “I was in that situation, and I don’t think I was a dangerous driver on track. So, for me, it’s something that can be reviewed. Maybe there’s another way of applying some sort of penalty without getting into the risk of having a driver missing a race.” As stewarding rows grow more common in the modern era, deterrents such as the points system have become a necessary part of the sport’s fabric — even if the drivers disagree on where the line should be drawn.