Former FIA president Max Mosley has found an unlikely kind word or two from Sir Jackie Stewart, who insisted that Ferrari were wrong to lay the blame for the struggles of F1's new teams at the door of Mosley.
Last week Ferrari released a rambling statement in which they criticised Mosley's "holy war" that he had waged against the manufacturer teams, which had resulted in the 2010 grid being full of unproven new teams.
Although neither USF1 or Stefan GP, both of whom were heavily criticised by the Italian team, made it onto the FIA's official entry list released today, Virgin and Lotus have struggled for pace in testing, and the newly rechristened Hispania team will not get to test their cars before the start of the season in Bahrain.
But Stewart insists that Mosley is not to blame for the issues, even though the former F1 champion accepts that the former president "overdid" his efforts to push through cost-cutting rules last summer.
"Everybody's had to cut their cloth, not because of any regulation of Max Mosley's," Stewart insisted in an interview on Wednesday.
"But I think he overdid the threat in trying to take out a lot of the big companies from the sport so small companies and teams could come in.
"It's been demonstrated smaller teams are not coming in very well."
He added that there was no reason for Formula 1 to distance themselves from big name manufacturers.
"We've lost BMW and Toyota, for example," Stewart noticed, "You mustn't start saying it's bad for the sport to have the big companies in. But I don't think we can blame Max Mosley for this - all of it anyway."
He did, though, add that: "He probably went a bit too far."
The Formula One grid has lost a number of big manufacturers over recent seasons, with both BMW and Toyota leaving at the end of 2009, and Renault selling a majority stake in their own operation to businessman Gerard Lopez.
But Stewart insisted that this ebb and flow of manufacturers in the sport had been the case throughout the history of the championship.
"They'll always come and go," he mused, "Everybody has great ambitions; not everybody can pull it together. The financial climate in the world at the present time doesn't make life very easy."
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