I recently picked up the latest issue of my favourite motoring publication – you know the one, it’s green and requires a love of Nigel Roebuck, a posh voice or an IQ in excess of 400 to be allowed to purchase a copy – and smiled at the front cover. No, there hadn’t been an epic cock-up at the printers with the semi-nude lines of a Mischa Barton GQ cover accidentally replacing that of the equally beautiful and sculptured lines of a 250F Maser, but instead it was a cover showing Sir Stirling Moss’ great big grinning face – for his 80th birthday he’d been given guest editorship of the magazine. In modest fashion he then proceeded to edit the magazine in such a way that the first 70 odd pages were about him and him alone. Motorsport Magazine: The Limited Narcissistic Edition is available in all good newsagents now.
In all seriousness, Moss was a fine talent and is an even finer gentleman. Despite incredible finesse and deep reserves of natural talent, a world title somehow eluded him, a statistic even more confusing and frustrating when you consider someone pants in a sheet white car is going to lift the crown in 2009. In spite of his interesting racing career where he won all sorts of events and a life of PR that followed, Moss hasn’t done much directly for motorsport. Sure, he brought media attention to the sport in Britain, but you could argue Hawthorn, Collins et al could easily have filled these boots. But here he is, face splashed across a magazine a century after he last competitively raced. And yet I can’t help but feel that a man who has had a far greater hand and influence in shaping Formula 1 in the last half-century is in no danger of getting his ego and legacy lavishly praised across magazines globally when the curtain comes down on his chequered career next month. I am of course talking about the sassy international barrister, the fearsomely intelligent physicist and the lover of a good spank, the one, the only Max Rufus Mosley.
To give a full account of Mosley’s highs and lows would result in you wearing out the scrollbar on your mouse, so seeing as I imagine no other publication will in the near future bother to write about Mosley’s life, I’ll take it upon myself to run the rule over the brief highlights of a bizarre career.
Team player
Mosley hasn’t always sat behind a desk cursing away and throwing darts at a Ron Dennis decorated dartboard. In the late 60s after realising his surname would effectively prohibit pursuing his ideal career of mainstream politics, a mid 20’s Max observed his first motor race at Silverstone and was instantly hooked, so much that he immediately went out and bought a racing car to have a dabble himself. Unlike his mate Ecclestone who was absolutely crap at racing (hint: scroll down a lot), Mosley wasn’t too bad at all, picking up a number of junior formulae victories and reaching European F2 status before a number of crashes made the Oxford graduate decide his talents were perhaps better served on the other side of the pit wall.
To do this, he formed March engineering (March was an acronym of its founders, Max Mosley, Alan Rees, Graham Coaker and Robin Herd – Mosley aside, now deceased or nobodies today) which could be termed the antithesis of BAR as instead of bleating on about how good they were going to be, March turned up and won two non-championship races and then strolled to victory in their second ever Grand Prix. An impressive start for this new outfit and with Max playing legal adviser and head of the commercial arm of the firm, March was in very capable and intelligent hands. Or they were at least in everywhere but the financial side of things, where despite supplying numerous cars to both F1 and lower formulae, that unfortunate business conundrum of costs exceeding income reared its ugly head and March began to haemorrhage performance and cash faster than Lehman Brothers’ 2008 accounts. Much restructuring followed as loss followed loss and top level results dried up, as did Mosley’s appetite for running an under-funded operation and so in 1977 he sold up to fully focus on his political F1 career as legal adviser to the Formula One Constructors Association (FOCA).
The first warpath
The reason why Mosley was always seen to be smug and muttering “lol no,” during the recent Formula One Teams Association (FOTA) vs. Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) brawl/bore fest is that he’d been there before and won. Plus on that occasion, he’d won playing the opposite role, effectively playing the role of the FOTA, so Mosley knew all the moves to play.
The full and complete story on the FOCA vs. the Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile (FISA – the sporting arm of the FIA) can be read elsewhere but in the interests of you not hitting ‘X’ in the top corner, I shall give you a vignette of F1 political history. In the mid 70s, Mosley, Bernie and a few other old boys set up the FOCA (so FOTA these days essentially - a lobbying group of a collection of teams bar Ferrari and Renault) to argue with then world governing body, the FISA (a subsidiary of the FIA) about commercial interests and anything else on Bernie’s mind at any given moment. And by commercial interests we mean squeeze as much money as possible from the FISA and into the FOCA members’ grubby back pockets. With Mosley, Ecclestone (then a team boss with Brabham), Chapman, Tyrrell, Williams and others on the FOCA’s side, it was quite an intimidating little group of angry Brits that formed this association.
Mosley was part of the FOCA as a team owner with March until 1977 when he left to become full time FOCA adviser due in part to his legal skills and wealth of contacts he’d built up over the last decade or so of racing. All was swell until the early 1980s when things came to a boil and all hell broke loose. The FOCA threw a fit for all manner of reasons, be it a feeling of a lack of appropriate remuneration from FISA, perception that FISA was biased in favour of the manufacturers (notably Ferrari and Renault) and that the FISA were personally responsible for Ecclestone being a midget. In short, to get what they wanted and led by Mosley, the FOCA threatened to the governing body a breakaway series (sound familiar?) and instead of just talking about it, they actually went ahead and briefly did it. The FISA President Jean-Marie Balestre promptly soiled himself at the prospect of a split and welcomed the fidgety Brits back into the fold, agreeing to essentially allow the FISA to make the rules and the FOCA to divvy up any television money they could scrounge. This FOCA/FISA agreement became known as the infamous Concorde Agreement, at the heart of many an eye-wateringly boring saga for decades to come. That Ecclestone and Mosley were able to force the FISA into agreeing this was an example of their craftiness and nous that would serve them and their Geneva bank balances well for the future.
FIA President
Much more pathetic FOCA vs. FISA arguing occurred after this opening duel that didn’t directly concern our man. This was because Mosley had dipped his toe in the world of mainstream politics again after signing the Concorde Agreement, though he finally gave that up for good when he crossed sides and returned to F1 in 1986 amusingly as part of the FISA, albeit with Ecclestone’s blessing. Inside man, anyone? Flexing his muscles, Mosley slowly strengthened his grip around the FIA by encouraging them to give Bernie a role in the federation to keep everyone sweet. An FIA VP position soon followed for the spectacled one - how Mosley and Ecclestone must’ve chuckled over a bottle of fine wine after the FIA signed off on that appointment.
Not content with the level of power he wielded in the FIA and motorsport generally, Mosley in 1991 went up against Balestre in an election to head up FISA. The character parallels with the current Todt and Vatanen battle are amusing to say the least – ex-racing driver turned politician going up against the old regime led by a fat Frenchman. In any event and to some surprise, Mosley won the 1991 vote and became FISA president, meaning Balestre was out on his arse, no doubt much to the amusement of Ecclestone and Mosley after their FOCA war ten years previously. Two years later Mosley amalgamated the FISA and the FIA into one which finished Balestre off as he was banished into some minor FIA role with a grand sounding title, the FIA equivalent of you or I being made Chairman & Global Commissioner of office toilet cleaning duties. This was also a humorous move by Mosley, not just because it was another opportunity to stamp on Balestre, but also because part of his 1991 campaign points had been that Balestre could not successfully manage both the FISA and the FIA – yet two years later when everything is under the FIA umbrella, Mosley can? Welcome to the spin and BS that is motorsport politics.
Mosley didn’t enjoy a controversy free FIA presidency during the 1990s, with more madness occurring than is possibly worth typing. Highlights included the overreaction to some tragic accidents in 1994 that saw Eau Rouge utterly butchered and Catalunya laughably chicane’d up to the eyeballs to Donategate – a “gate” just coined by me now where Mosley and Ecclestone again got together to argue with someone, this time the Labour party and Tony Blair about allowing tobacco sponsorship of the sport when every other sport was to have it banned. Little and large combined successfully again as F1 ridiculously got its exemption, with Ecclestone even getting his £1m convincer donation back as an added bonus. Ecclestone and Mosley’s best example of old chums scratching each other’s backs however came at the turn of the century in ludicrous fashion. After much arguing with the European Court, Mosley and the FIA managed to sell the TV rights to Bernie’s FOM for $300m (£184m at today’s exchange rate) for a contract period of 100 years. Obviously the number of zeroes got lost in translation as this is a ludicrous price given how hundreds of millions of people tune in for no overtaking madness every fortnight. Let’s do some maths. $300m over 100 years works out as $3m a year, which is absurd when you compare this to have television rights for the English Premier League (EPL) for the next three seasons will net the league £1.8bn ($2.93bn). If one temporarily becomes a geek and extrapolates that equivalent amount for 100 years, that works out as a ~$97.5bn contract for EPL rights over 100 years. So per year that’s $975m, or in F1 terms, $972m more than Bernie has to pay yearly for F1 – and F1 is the definitive global sport, whereas the EPL is just a fraction of football. You’ve got to laugh. Anyway, speaking of screwing things over ...
Spankgate, the return warpath and bowing out
If you can forgive me for that dreadful segue then do please read on. I’m not going to go into the various ins and outs as it were of this lurid affair as I’m sure you all know the boring intimate details. Obviously everyone is different and has their own opinion, but I’m personally torn in the stakes of what was most amusing in this whole affair between the post-spank cuppa and the staggering 103 to 55 votes of confidence Mosley received to stay in office. Stay in office however he did, which allowed Mosley to continue his mischievous and peculiar ways, introducing white elephants to go on top of overseeing more crap ideas.
Mosley’s final day out in the sun that allowed him to grandstand some more came in the summer of 2009 with the FOTA vs. FIA debacle. Led by the tanned one, FOTA basically got wound up over proposed Max’s attempts to strong-arm all teams for 2010 to accept some crazy new rules, notably a budget cap and a two-tiered set of rules, beneficial only to those who were skint. After much arguing about cost cutting ironically on super yachts, in typical F1 style no agreement was arrived at and so the mother of all poo storms rained down on Silverstone. FOTA laughably announced they were going to start a new series, whilst Mosley just leaned back and laughed and declared no new Concorde Agreement (Mosley’s baby) would be agreed to unless it was on his terms. The deadline for 2010 entrants passed and Mosley managed to fill a 2010 grid minus FOTA teams, even if some of the entrants were laughable at best. As an aside, March in its present form is a non-trading company and is solely owned by Robin Herd, so those of you who were paying attention earlier will remember he was the H in MARCH – so it appears all Mosley did was ring up his mate and ask him to do an old pal a favour and put in an entry to help pad things out a bit. Other entrants were equally absurd and rightly extracted from the final entry list when a FOTA/FIA truce was finally reached.
What FOTA didn’t really foresee, predict or just research during the entire tedious saga was that Mosley had been on their side of the fence in this argument 30 years ago as discussed earlier. He knew all their moves before they even played them, how they would act and react, what pressures they were working under and that with every day that passed the more it played into the FIA’s hands as days were swallowed up to get a new championship off the ground. Accordingly he acted like a man with little to care about in the world and as the head honcho stated, to good effect. After finally coming down from his and Ecclestone’s usual opening negotiating point of absolutely our way or the highway, Mosley turned FOTA round into agreeing into racing in 2010 along side three new teams. Impressive given a few weeks earlier things had looked like they were headed for a split series, one containing Ferrari, McLaren and Renault with the other Litespeed (regularly last in a very weak British F3), N.Technology (who?) and USF1 (this isn’t A1GP, fellas). Probably best they all came together in the end, then.
On July 15th 2009 Mosley agreed to finally step down as FIA president at the end of the year, believing his work was done and his ego massaged sufficiently one more time. This was of course not before threatening to have a fifth go on the FIA Presidential merry-go-round, no doubt much to the delight of Dave Richards.
Memories
So how will Mosley be remembered? Apart from the obvious spankgate, one imagines his time will be remembered for being at the centre of many a public showdown with some very influential people and companies. I would argue however that anyone in his role would find themselves in a similar simultaneous fire fighting and head judge role – with so many egos and balance sheets confined into such a small space, friction is inevitable and you could argue he has done a highly respectable job to avoid the wheels coming off the rails in any major way during his tenure.
How Mosley will mainly be remembered I believe though is not for his work with NCAP or introducing the HANS device to aid safety for all drivers. I even don’t even believe affection will be showered upon him for his globally loved KERS or grooved tyres. No, I believe his legacy will be remembered for how he managed relationships. In short, if you keep Mosley sweet it appears he will help you out in kind, just ask Bernie about this, or new Manor GP Technical Director Nick Wirth who first encountered Mosley in the late 80s as a promising engineering graduate student. The two formed Simtek, an engineering firm and have enjoyed a close relationship since, with payback now seemingly coming in the form of the FIA dissing for 2010 F1 the seemingly more qualified Prodrive for Wirth’s entrant, even if the team leader seems like a random bloke off the street.
Down the other side of this though is how if you cross Mosley, you’re pretty much in for it. Just ask Ron Dennis, who had his company stripped of $100m for something he had nothing to do with and then Flavio Briatore was banned from everything in life bar breathing because he rubbed Mosley the wrong way. One gets the feeling if he could’ve taken di Montezemolo’s scalp too then he would have, but two out of three ain’t bad for an old guy.
Phew, all done. Cup of tea anyone?
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