Marques sends the note before a wheel turns
The FIA declared a heat hazard for this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix earlier today. Race director Rui Marques sent the notice to teams on Thursday morning, before any car had run at Monza.
The trigger is a forecast heat index above 31.0 °C at some point during Sunday’s race. That crosses the line set in Article B1.5.10 of the F1 regulations, and once the Official Weather Service delivers that projection the declaration follows automatically.
“In accordance with Article B1.5.10 of the FIA F1 Regulations, having received a forecast from the Official Weather Service predicting that the Heat Index will be greater than 31.0 °C at some time during the Race at this Competition, a Heat Hazard is declared,” Marques wrote.
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What the declaration changes on the cars
Teams must now fit advanced driver cooling systems. Those systems add hardware, and the hardware adds mass, so the minimum car weight rises to absorb the extra equipment. Nobody gains an advantage by skipping the kit.
Drivers get a second option on top of that. Each can choose to race in a specially designed cooling vest, worn under the overalls, or go without. The choice belongs to the driver rather than the team.
Monza is the first race to fall under the protocol since the Austrian Grand Prix in June. That gap matters. The procedure exists precisely because these weekends are rare enough that teams cannot simply carry the equipment everywhere as a matter of routine.
Qatar 2023 still sets the standard
The protocol arrived in 2025, written in direct response to the 2023 Qatar Grand Prix. Several drivers were physically overwhelmed by the conditions at Lusail that night. One vomited in his helmet, another needed medical attention after climbing out, and the images pushed the governing body into codifying a response rather than leaving heat management to individual teams.
Monza in early September rarely produces that kind of extreme, but 31 degrees on the heat index at a circuit where cars spend more than three-quarters of a lap at full throttle puts real load on cockpit temperatures. The FIA has decided not to wait and see.
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