How behaviour science explains what went wrong with the F1 title decider

As a behavioural scientist and F1 fan, I watched the chequered flag wave on the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix with a mix of excitement and confusion. The incredible championship fight between Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton had ended in the most intense and dramatic way possible — an epic last lap battle that only happened thanks to a sudden, unprecedented decision by the race director Michael Masi. What a way to end the season!

Over the hours and days since those thrilling moments, I became increasingly concerned as the F1 fan community imploded in a mix of rulebook lawyering, rage and vitriol. Some people were saying Masi was deliberately favouring Max over Lewis. Some people were calling for Masi to be fired. Some people were even making death threats.

In effect, Michael Masi ruined the season.

So Masi has to go.

The thing is, what science tells us about decision making under pressure actually leads to a very different conclusion — it’s not Masi’s fault.

Decision making under pressure: a short interlude

What F1 fans and commentators need to understand about decision making is that it’s driven by two very different cognitive processes, famously discovered by the Nobel-prize winning behavioural scientist Daniel Kahneman and explained in great detail in his bestselling book Thinking Fast And Slow.

The short version is that we have two systems that can drive our decision making:

System 1 — the ‘fast thinking’ system. This is the system that takes over when we have to make a decision quickly under time pressure. It helps us to choose a course of action in an instant when it’s important to act fast and make a clear decision one way or another, but it’s prone to biases, cognitive fallacies and stereotyping. Thinking Fast And Slow is full of examples where System 1 fails us. System 1 is the system at fault when we jump to conclusions that, when we have the time and space to reflect, were actually not right, but it’s also the system that tells a racing driver to go for a gap, or helps them navigate through a messy start unscathed.

System 2 — the ‘slow thinking’ system. This system is a careful, deliberative system that makes use of our capacity for rational judgement and complex thought, but it acts much more slowly than System 1. It allows us to evaluate all the information available to us, weigh each piece of evidence carefully, and make the best choice we can based on that information. It’s most useful for situations that have a lot of nuance, where our choice might have lasting consequences and we need to be sure we’re considering all possibilities before choosing to act — for example, car development decisions or making strategy plans before a race weekend.

F1 is exciting because of ‘fast thinking’

When teams and drivers make split second decisions (should we pit under safety car? Should I go for the overtake on this corner or is it too dangerous?), they’re relying on fast (System 1) thinking, and that’s part of what makes Formula 1 so fun to watch. The outcome of a race, and ultimately the outcome of the entire season, often turns on just a few key choices that are made in a single moment, where one tiny misjudgement makes the difference between glorious victory or frustrating defeat.

In a sport that’s all about speed, seeing people make snap judgements in the face of uncertainty is part of the thrill. But the recriminations and backlash against Michael Masi following his controversial title-deciding last lap decision have shown in the most painful, ugly detail that expectations are totally different for the race director compared to the expectations on the teams and drivers.

In fact, understanding System 1 and System 2 thinking explains how Masi was essentially set up to fail in this scenario, and also gives us some important learnings about how the sport can change.

Masi was trying to make a ‘slow thinking’ decision in a ‘fast thinking’ timeframe

“Making the right choice should be easy!” I hear you shout. “Just follow the rulebook!”

In an ideal scenario, yes, but let’s consider what Masi was trying to keep in mind at the moment he had to choose what to do.

• The rules which he as race director is supposed to implement
• Team principals on the radio, pleading with him to make a choice that benefited their team
• Information coming in about whether the track was clear or not
• The guiding principles of ‘let them race’ and for races to finish under green flag conditions, which the teams had previously agreed to
• Broader pressures, like making F1 an entertaining sport

This all adds up to a huge amount of information for one person to try and keep in mind at once. And what cognitive system is best for making decisions where you have many different variables to consider? It’s System 2!

“But it’s so simple! All he had to do, is ignore all those other things and simply follow the rulebook!” I hear you cry again. That might be true and a rulebook is exactly what System 1 needs, but the reality of the matter is that Masi was confronted with a difficult choice, particularly when it comes to ‘let them race’ versus the rulebook. Does he follow the rules, or follow the ‘let them race’ principle?

This is now getting a little meta, but there are no super clear rules that tell Masi what to do, when a new principle has been agreed since the time the rules were originally written, and that principle and the rules disagree on what the correct next action is. What we need a rule here for is — what should you do when a principle (‘let them race’) and rules (regulations about use of the safety car) are in conflict? Well, you might decide that the correct thing in that scenario might be to follow the rules as written, or your decision might be to follow the newly agreed principle, but to be able to make that decision at all, again you need your System 2.

But, because of the time pressures on Masi, slow and steady System 2 isn’t going to be much help. He has to make a fast thinking, System 1 decision.

And just like that, he sets in motion a whole snowballing mass of events that ultimately come to land squarely (and quite unfairly) on his own head.

Slow thinking is for writing the rulebook, fast thinking is for implementing it

The important question for us to think about now, is not whether Masi made the right decision in that moment. In that situation, no one (not even you!) is going to make a well-informed decision, because there just isn’t enough time for the slow thinking system to go through its careful process. All the armchair commentators back home have the benefit of putting on their slow thinking hats to do a thorough analysis of Masi’s choices, but with just seconds to make a choice, what would they have done?

This mistaken assumption, that Masi made a System 2 decision, also comes through in a lot of the anger targeted towards Masi —that he weighed up the options in front of him and made a conscious, deliberate choice (i.e. a System 2 choice) to favour Max over Lewis, or favour Netflix-esque entertainment over fair sporting competition. But all this armchair analysis is based on a fundamentally wrong belief — that Masi could even use System 2 thinking at that moment, when as we’ve seen, only System 1 can help you when you have seconds to spare.

The right question to ask is — what can we do to make sure that fast thinking leads us to the right decision, and not the wrong one?

One of the most important things that can be done is to remove ambiguity — to make the decision entirely based on crystal clear protocols, and to mandate strict adherence to these protocols at all times. No room for deliberation, information gathering or conscious thought, all you do is follow the checklist. This is the approach that’s been so successful in aircraft safety and surgery, two other fields that also have suffered from catastrophic incidents where pilots or surgeons have been forced to make a System 2 style decision under System 1 time pressure.

Practically speaking, F1 is already moving in the right direction by thinking about banning team principals from talking to the race director during the race. That’s one pressure off Masi’s plate.

The other major source of ambiguity here is the ‘let them race’ guiding principle. Having vague principles instead of strict rules is a great way to introduce chaos into System 1 so that you end up with inconsistent and suboptimal decisions (here’s a great book on that subject). In the future, if principles like ‘let them race’ or ‘try to finish the race under green flag conditions where possible’ are agreed on, they should ideally be codified in a very clear set of rules specifying exactly what actions are required from the race director in specific scenarios, rather than left up to a time-pressured in-the-moment System 1 judgement that ends up making everyone unhappy.

Of course, the reality is that however much you try and write watertight rules, there are always going to be areas of ambiguity and uncertainty, and that’s another thing which makes F1 so fun — the constant arms race between teams and the regulations to find the line of just what you can get away with, in car development or on the track. But that’s a topic for another article!

What next for F1: let’s think slowly so we can think fast

The key thing to remember though is that when F1 inevitably runs into situations where too much ambiguity has led to a bad System 1 snap judgement, everyone needs to take a breath. Put down the pitchforks. Remember that what’s happened is just the same thing that has happened time and time again in the airline and medical worlds — someone has made a mistake, but behind that human error is the actual problem, that fast thinking System 1 has been set up to fail by being placed in a scenario where it’s simply impossible to make the right decision under pressure. And the way to resolve this isn’t to demand more and more from System 1, but to use our slow thinking System 2 to design better rules and frameworks so that fast thinking System 1 will be able to make the right choice in the future. Improve the rules, clarify the race director’s role, make all fast decision making an unambiguous choice.

If F1 can do those things, hopefully the next time a race official has to make a championship-deciding decision in the space of a few seconds, they will get it absolutely, unquestionably right.