Formula 1 race stewards are considering whether they should introduce a system whereby they regularly meet to review and discuss penalties in order to improve consistency and decision making.
It comes as a number of penalties this season were criticised for being unfair or inconsistent, particularly in Mexico when Max Verstappen was penalised for cutting a corner, but Lewis Hamilton wasn't.
During an FIA race stewards meeting in Vienna on Tuesday, a number of areas of improvement were discussed, including the ambiguous wording of the rules and penalty consistency.
"We went through a lot of rules and looked at how we can work with the FIA to tidy up the wording, enabling us to take quicker decisions," said stewards’ chairman Garry Connelly.
"We talked a lot about how we can achieve better consistency. We think that more meetings and more reviews of past decisions are necessary, so that we all understand how each panel of stewards is treating a particular situation, especially where it’s necessary for the stewards to make a subjective ruling, on a dangerous driving charge for example. That is quite a subjective issue.
“These are obviously decisions that are made collectively but understanding how those decision can be made more consistent is valuable."
In order to achieve that, Connelly confirmed a review system is under consideration for 2017 and beyond.
"We looked at a system that the DMSB uses to review races," he said. "The stewards get together by video link to look back at incidents and discuss the decisions made. We thought that might be good thing to do every three or four races."
Other topics of discussion included track limits and Connelly believes track modifications are the answer, whereby larger kerbs are added to deter and punish drivers for running wide or cutting corners.
"There are now probably only 11 or 12 corners across the whole championship where there is the potential for cutting corners in a very obvious way," he added. "There are solutions that can be adopted to sort those issues out, such as the solution that has been adopted for Turn One in Monza, where if you do go off there is a natural penalty in that it takes you longer to rejoin than if you had used the circuit. That makes it a lot easier for the stewards as the penalty is applied on track.
"The point we also made is that the rules say a driver can rejoin the track as long as you do it safely and gain no lasting advantage. The word lasting is again very subjective. Does it mean lasting for 500m, until the next turn, the next few laps or the whole race? That subjectivity is removed if the circuit is modified or designed to immediately disadvantage a driver if he does go off track."
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