Hamilton requests the implementation of an AI to avoid human errors made by the FIA commissioners

The Mercedes driver proposed the idea of implementing artificial intelligence to manage track incidents, rather than using race officials employed by the FIA, International Automobile Federation.

During the Singapore Grand Prix, Max Verstappen managed to avoid a grid penalty despite being summoned for a trio of obstruction incidents after qualifying.

His blocking of Yuki Tsunoda’s AlphaTauri was particularly scrutinized, as he held the Japanese driver between turns 3 and 4, but he only received a reprimand from the stewards.

This seems to go against the previous incidents of the 2023 season, with one of the stewards admitting in Japan that an error had been made. As a result, the FIA has decided that this verdict against Verstappen would indeed be erased from the record books and ignored.

Verstappen himself admitted after the fact that it was detrimental to Tsunoda. « It wasn’t right on my part. I didn’t see him because I was on the radio talking about the [car] issue. And then I wasn’t warned before he was practically behind me ». Red Bull has been fined by the FIA for its role in the incident.

Hamilton is not the only one in favor of AI

Earlier this year, Haas team boss Günther Steiner got into trouble for criticizing the stewards, denouncing their lack of consistency in their decisions after Nico Hülkenberg received a time penalty in Monaco for what appeared to be a valid overtake on Logan Sargeant, during the first lap. The FIA usually tends to be more lenient during the first lap, considering the start as a difficult exercise in F1.

The F1 does not have permanent stewards. The personnel changes based on the race weekends because a single group of stewards committing to every race weekend would be challenging.

The composition of the jury includes a member appointed by the national sports authority of the host country, while the FIA selects three members, one of whom is appointed as the president, from a pool of qualified candidates.

Among the four commissioners, a former race car driver is also part of the panel to provide his opinion on what a driver might have been thinking during an incident, and to try to take it into account when deciding on a possible sanction to apply.

But instead of hiring permanent commissioners for Grand Prix weekends, Hamilton suggested that F1 consider using artificial intelligence to make decisions on these types of incidents.

« I think we should start considering the possibility of using AI for this kind of thing, in order to obtain good decisions. I would like to see if AI could do a better job or not. »

How to get a helpful response from the AI?

Artificial intelligence is an algorithm with a massive database that enables it to know what to do when certain conditions are met.

AI must first be fed and “trained” in order to be used with an interesting level of reliability. AI must, in particular, learn the rules established by the FIA and understand each evolution of the regulations. It must then examine every specific situation that occurred in the past and the decisions that resulted from them in order to understand the exceptions.

The main difficulty here lies in the reading of incidents. If the AI is not capable of seeing a race, on the other hand, it can be given a visual sequence to analyze, requiring significant upstream work to visually format the action so that it corresponds to a message that can be properly analyzed by the algorithm.

In other words, it is not yet developed or integrated.