Mohammed Ben Sulayem Wants To Remove FIA Presidential Term Limits

Mohammed Ben Sulayem is proposing to remove presidential term limits at the FIA, a move that would allow him to continue beyond the current 12-year ceiling that his predecessor Jean Todt put in place. The proposal goes to next month’s General Assembly, where it is expected to pass. At the same time, two further rule changes would raise the barrier for future candidates significantly. Thomas Bach faced the same question at the IOC last year and turned it down, saying new times call for new leaders. The FIA is moving in the opposite direction.

Key Points: FIA Presidential Term Limits Removal

• Ben Sulayem is proposing removal of the FIA presidential term limit, currently capped at three four-year terms (12 years maximum), at next month’s General Assembly
• The proposal is expected to pass. An FIA spokesperson framed it as creating consistent tenure rules across all FIA bodies
• Two additional rule changes raise the barrier for future candidates: a new experience clause and the VP submission window more than doubled from 49 to 100 days before election
• Tim Mayer, blocked from the 2025 presidential ballot, says term limits are a fundamental safeguard of good governance, not a bureaucratic detail
• IOC president Thomas Bach rejected the same option last year, declining to extend beyond 12 years and citing the need for new leadership
• Laura Villars continues her legal action in the French courts challenging the FIA’s election process

What Is Being Proposed

Under current FIA statutes, the presidential term is four years and a person can stand for re-election twice, making the maximum tenure 12 years. Ben Sulayem has been president since December 2021 and was re-elected unopposed in December 2025 for a second term running to 2029. Under the existing rules, one further term after that would be the ceiling.

The proposal removes that ceiling entirely. No maximum. No end point. The FIA’s justification is consistency across its own bodies. The World Councils and the Senate carry no term limits, so the FIA says the presidency should match them. But it leaves an obvious question. If consistency is the goal, why not add limits to the bodies that lack them rather than remove the one that exists? The FIA had no answer for that.

The current three-term limit was introduced by Ben Sulayem’s predecessor Jean Todt. Todt himself replaced Max Mosley, who served as FIA president from 1993 until 2009 when he agreed not to stand again following a dispute with F1 teams. The limit was a governance guardrail put in after a long era of concentrated presidential power. Removing it reverses that.

The Two Additional Changes

The term limit proposal is not arriving on its own. Two further rule changes arrive with it, both of which make future challenges to the presidency harder to mount.

First, a new requirement for presidential candidates to demonstrate sufficient experience within an FIA member or an FIA body. The phrase is deliberately broad, and the FIA decides how it gets interpreted.

Second, the window for prospective candidates to submit their vice-presidential support list has been more than doubled, from 49 days to 100 days before the election date. This is significant because the VP nomination process is precisely where the 2025 election was decided before it began. Only one South American candidate, Fabiana Ecclestone, appeared on the eligible list, and she had already committed to Ben Sulayem’s team. Mayer and Villars both failed to build a complete ticket as a result. Extending the submission window to 100 days means challengers must assemble their full slate even earlier, against an incumbent who holds the existing network and relationships across all six global regions.

What FIFA Did After Blatter

Sepp Blatter served as FIFA president for 17 years before corruption investigations forced him out in 2015. His predecessor Joao Havelange had been in the role for 24 years before him. When FIFA rebuilt its governance in the aftermath of the Blatter scandal, the centrepiece of the reform package was a 12-year presidential term limit: three terms of four years, maximum. The reform committee that designed it said explicitly that limits were needed to cut the political dependencies and relationships that come with people staying too long in key positions. It passed by 179 votes to 22 at the extraordinary congress in Zurich in February 2016. One of the first acts of a reformed FIFA was to write a ceiling into its statutes.

The FIA eventually introduced the same safeguard into its own statutes under Jean Todt, for broadly the same reasons. Long unchecked tenure concentrates power and erodes accountability. That is usually why institutions introduce term limits in the first place. FIFA reached that point after 40-plus combined years of Havelange and Blatter. The FIA introduced the same safeguard long before it found itself facing similar governance questions.

The proposal now going to the General Assembly would remove it altogether. FIFA, despite growing criticism around the way Gianni Infantino’s presidency has interacted with those rules, still formally retains its 12-year limit. The FIA is voting on whether to scrap the equivalent safeguard entirely.

The FIA pointed to the NFL when asked to justify the change, citing Roger Goodell’s tenure as commissioner since 2006. But the structures are not directly comparable. Goodell is appointed by franchise owners inside a closed commercial league. The FIA presidency is an elected governance role inside a member-led organisation with 240 clubs across six continents. The FIA struggled to properly explain the logic when pressed on it.

The Election That Already Closed Itself

Ben Sulayem was re-elected unopposed in December. Not because nobody tried. Mayer tried. Villars tried. A third candidate tried. All three were blocked before they reached the ballot. The FIA’s regional VP requirement demanded one eligible candidate from each global region. South America had one name on the approved list. Fabiana Ecclestone. Already committed to Ben Sulayem’s ticket. Without a second name from the region, no rival could build a complete slate. The election closed before it opened.

Mayer called it the illusion of democracy at the time. Villars took her challenge to the courts in Paris. The case is still ongoing. The FIA’s position has been that the rules were already published and well established. That may be true of the letter of the statutes. It does not change the reality that the election felt closed before anyone had a chance to run.

Taken together, the three proposals remove the time ceiling on the presidency, add a new qualification barrier for future candidates, and push the VP submission process even further in favour of the incumbent network already in place. The FIA can justify each change individually on administrative grounds. Taken together, the broader direction becomes fairly clear.

Coffee Corner Take

It will probably pass. The membership has shown no appetite to fight it and the structure that reaches the General Assembly rewards continuity over disruption.

FIFA introduced the same 12-year limit the FIA is now removing, and they did it in direct response to what happens when you let a president run unchecked for 17 years. The reform committee that designed it said the limits existed to cut the political dependencies that come with people staying too long. FIFA reached that point after the Blatter era. The FIA introduced the same principle into its own statutes on the same logic. Now the FIA wants to remove it while FIFA holds the line it drew in 2016.

The NFL comparison also says quite a lot about how the FIA views this situation. Formula 1 increasingly resembles American franchise sport in commercial terms. Team valuations have exploded, long-term investment has become central to the championship, and continuity is prized in the same way it is across major US leagues. That commercial direction has been largely positive for the sport’s growth under Liberty Media. But the FIA presidency is still supposed to function as an elected governance role inside a member-led institution rather than an appointed executive position serving franchise owners. Goodell works for NFL ownership. The FIA president is supposed to answer to the membership itself. The concern some critics will have is whether the philosophy around the presidency is now starting to follow the commercial logic of the sport rather than the governance logic of the institution.

That does not mean FIFA escaped criticism itself. Gianni Infantino’s presidency has already faced scrutiny over the interpretation of those same rules after FIFA decided his first partial term from 2016 to 2019 would not count towards the limit. But even there, the ceiling itself remained in place. What the FIA is now discussing goes further than interpretation. It is about removing the safeguard altogether.

Term limits are not a bureaucratic detail. They exist because concentrated power inside any institution over time becomes less accountable to the people it serves. The FIA wrote that principle into its own statutes after the Mosley era. It is now proposing to remove it.

Villars is still in court. The last election ended with an unopposed candidate because of how the rules operated. And now the same General Assembly that was elected alongside Ben Sulayem is being asked to change statutes that directly benefit his continued tenure. For fans who already feel the FIA operates as a closed network, that sequence is uncomfortable reading. It does not require a conspiracy theory. Taken individually and together, the governance changes introduced during this presidency make it progressively harder to mount a credible challenge. Whether that was the intent is not something anyone outside the inner circle can say with certainty. What fans can see is the pattern. And that pattern does not sit well with a fanbase that already has limited trust in how the sport governs itself.

Whether it passes or not, the proposal makes clear where this presidency believes power should sit. The broader direction feels fairly clear now, with more authority concentrated around the presidency itself.