FIA President Jean Todt believes F1 needs to be less controversial following some major disputes in the sport between teams. This year has seen flexi-wings, Pirelli's tyres and track limits become a widely talked about topic whilst Ferrari reached a private settlement with the FIA over their power units last year and Racing Point (now Aston Martin) were fined and docked 15 points for running brake ducts that did not comply with F1's technical design rules. “More competition means more controversy,” Todt told RacingNews365.com and other select members of the press. “And that’s our world. Probably I would prefer less controversy in our sport. But that isn’t the nature of our sport. “Honestly I’ve been trying to have less controversy and to do as much as possible to make people [come] together. Which incidentally, it’s something I mentioned already last year, probably Covid-19 was among the positive things. It’s been able to make all of us work together in one direction. “There is so much tension, so much competition, but again, it’s the nature of the sport. So you have a controversy about the flexibility of the wing, about tyre pressure about anything, I could go on. "What I really want [is] that we have a good governance and in all that we do we have ethics, good compliance in our sport.” The complex nature of motorsport has made F1 challenging to police according to Todt although he feels F1's technical sporting committee is doing what it can to govern the sport. “[It’s] difficult because interpretation of the regulations, where is the border between ‘you can’, ‘you can’t’ – it’s not my job to do it but my job is to make sure we have the best people," explained Todt. Clearly, we have reinforced drastically the team, as you know. “Incidentally we have something which is very important, We have what we call the technical sporting committee, because I hate to be in a position to have one guy deciding ‘you can’, ‘you can’t’ – it would be bad for us, bad for him, bad for everybody. "So we have a steering committee, which we have also reinforced to help the governing as much as we can. “So that’s what we need to do and more competition, more possibility of interpreting so we have to be very, very, very strict on achieving that.” Todt also confirmed that he was worried about Max Verstappen's and Lance Stroll's Baku crashes which prompted the introduction of a new tyre technical directive which regulates how the teams operate their tyres. “I’ve been very, of course, very concerned with that," said Tost. Immediately when it happened, I was not in Baku, but I called our people I called Mario Isola, I spoke with him, with them, several times.” “The first thought was it was due to debris, which was not the case. It seemed that it had been around the use of the tyres. So we have produced what we call a TD to make sure that the teams are all using the tyres the same way.”
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