Formula 1 loves to sell itself as the slickest travelling show in sport: freight timed to the minute, pit stops measured in tenths, operations rooms full of screens and headsets. The FIA has now put a hard number on the less photogenic reality — that, for all the championship’s polish and money, the thing still leans heavily on people who turn up, train up, and get on with it for free.
A new FIA research report has quantified what anyone who’s spent time trackside already knows: the volunteer workforce isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s structural. Across a standard grand prix weekend, an average of 838 volunteers are required. Scale that to a 24-round calendar in 2026 and you land at 20,112 trained volunteers needed across the season to stage the championship safely and efficiently.
Those aren’t casual roles, either. This is the army of flag marshals around the lap, scrutineers in the garages and parc fermé, incident officers, and extrication teams supporting medical response — the jobs where consistency, calm judgement and process matter far more than profile. The report states each volunteer contributes an average of 48 hours per event, adding up to 965,376 hours of donated time in a season.
Perhaps the most telling statistic, given how often F1’s expansion is discussed in terms of market reach and commercial upside: 65 per cent of those volunteers are taking unpaid leave or using holiday entitlement to be there. In other words, many are effectively paying in time — and often money — to help the world’s most advanced single-seater series run on schedule.
The FIA’s study, carried out by the FIA University in collaboration with the Sporting Organisers Working Group (SOWG), also attempts to put an economic frame around it. Using an industry-standard ‘replacement labour cost’ model, it values the volunteer labour at €13.2 million. The costs associated with recruiting, training and delivering this volunteer workforce are put at around €11.1 million annually, with the FIA describing that as an investment it makes to keep the pipeline sustainable.
There’s an important nuance in that wording. F1 weekends don’t just “have marshals”; they have marshals who must be trained to an exacting standard, refreshed, assessed, and supported — across different circuits, cultures, and operational environments. The report says 85 per cent of volunteers have previously worked a grand prix, a figure that underlines how dependent the championship is on retained experience. It also flags the obvious vulnerability: if the sport doesn’t continually seed new talent alongside the veterans, the whole system gets brittle.
From the organisers surveyed — 19 in total, with 24 races initially scheduled for 2026 — the report also draws out where the pressure points are. Scrutineering is identified “by some margin” as the most challenging role to fill, reflecting the level of qualification and experience required. By contrast, organisers reported a readier supply of volunteers for event command and control. That tracks with paddock reality: highly specialised technical officials are harder to find, harder to develop, and harder to replace.
The report’s subtext is just as interesting as its headline numbers. F1 is in the middle of a regulatory reset for 2026, and the calendar has become a long-haul endurance exercise for everyone involved. Against that backdrop, the FIA is effectively warning that growth has a human ceiling. It concludes that the sport must ensure “a significant pool of volunteers exists” to support any further expansion into new territories — a polite way of saying you can’t just keep adding races and assume the same local ecosystem will materialise instantly.
It also lifts the lid on how much work happens long before the cars arrive. The average preparation time for an F1 event is confirmed by respondents as seven months, a commitment shared between SOWG members, host clubs and volunteers. That timeline matters: it’s another reminder that a grand prix isn’t simply a weekend booking; it’s a prolonged mobilisation.
In response, the FIA points to structural change already underway. In 2025 it established an Officials Department aimed at modernising how race officials are managed, trained and supported. Previously, recruitment and development were less centralised and more dependent on regional bodies — a model that, according to the report, created gaps in consistency and transparency. Licensing and training are now part of a common framework, while still allowing regional bodies latitude to address “local needs and circumstances”.
The direction of travel is clear: less reliance on ad-hoc volunteerism and more of a professionalised, standardised model across an increasingly global championship. The FIA also notes there’s currently a pool of more than 300,000 officials worldwide available for volunteer work across FIA-governed categories year-round — an important point, because F1’s needs don’t exist in isolation; they compete with and depend on the wider motorsport ecosystem.
FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has framed the report as both recognition and justification.
“The FIA Formula One World Championship relies on volunteers; they are the backbone of our sport – without them, we simply could not go racing,” he said. “They ensure our competitions are safe and fair. They act with professionalism and pride, and they support drivers, teams and fans.”
What the report does, more than anything, is strip away the comforting myth that F1 is a purely top-down machine powered by manufacturers, sponsors and billion-dollar infrastructure. Underneath the carbon fibre and the hospitality units, it still depends on thousands of people in orange overalls and official bibs, giving up evenings, weekends, and annual leave to stand in the heat, the rain, and the spray — because they care about the sport and they’re good at what they do.
The FIA is recommending that recognition and investment in career pathways and support structures should be “further enhanced”, and it points to a planned dedicated officials training centre — the FIA Centre of Excellence — designed to create a long-term system for recruitment, training, management, retention and development of “world-class motorsport officials” across its wider ecosystem.
In a championship obsessed with marginal gains, the volunteer workforce might be the biggest unpriced asset of the lot. The uncomfortable question is whether F1’s relentless growth curve has properly accounted for it — or whether the sport has simply assumed the backbone will always hold.
