Friday, June 19, 2009

F1 opinion: Why time has finally come for Max Mosley to change ...

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So what’s different five years on ?

Well for one thing the teams are united - say they are and appear to be so.

And if you weigh up the options facing us today, things do not look good for Mosley or the FIA.

If Ferrari, McLaren, Brawn, Button, Alonso, Raikkonen, Hamilton and their camp were racing at Silverstone in June 2010 in FormulaWhatever and on the same day Rosberg and Nakajima (who?) are doing battle with Fisichella and errr…who’s his teammate again, oh yes, Adrian Sutil at Donington, plus miscellaneous others, guess where the fans will be going ?

And it doesn't stop there. There are circuits ditched by F1 in recent years that would stage a race next month never mind next year.

Among them are legendary names like Silverstone and Imola and perhaps one of the two German circuits currently sharing their slot on the F1 calendar. Add Kyalami, Buenos Aires, Adelaide, Estoril, Suzuka and that’s just for starters.

Unusually, it appears Mosley has overplayed his hand.

What the teams want is not unreasonable, what he wants is. It will cost misery and thousands of jobs lost needlessly when the team’s "glide path" proposals will get the job done just as well but over a longer time frame.

Mosley has insisted on a £40m cap but why that figure? It’s a ridiculous, arbitrary number. Why should he object to a £150m cap for instance?

That would cut budgets at the top end of the scale by two-thirds and probably keep the teams happy.

The teams argue it is unfair that after decades of building the sport they should agree to budget cuts so extreme that any Johnny-come-lately can compete with a set of rules that appears to give the newcomers the upper hand.

Yet again Mosley has come up with a new rule as a reaction to the times without sufficient research or consultation.

The last example was KERS, the boost button, which only a handful of teams are using, is hideously expensive and will be ditched at the end of the year.

The benefit to the sport and even the wider motoring world has been negligible but the cost has run to at least £150m, teams say. At least. And in these precarious times!

Mosley has to beware that in the drive to cut and cut and cut to fashion a new future for Formula 1 he isn’t standing on the wrong side when the axe falls.

And that he doesn’t employ the same bully boy tactics he has always used simply because, for the good of the whole sport, it always worked before.

For a man who has shown real vision in the past he is certainly appearing very short sighted at the moment.

Will there be a resolution to the current crisis? Of course there will, whether it takes one week, one month, one year or one decade is another matter.

The only question really to be asked is: "hat shape will the sport be left in when the dust finally settles?

Of course there are those who say this is not about just getting the rules right and fine-tuning the process of governance.

Some believe it is ultimately not about HOW the sport is governed but WHO it is governed by.

Few would argue that politics has been a disproportionate part of the Formula 1 landscape for far too long.

Isn’t it an interesting co-incidence that Mosley said long ago he would announce before the end of this month (ie before the next race in Germany) whether he would stand for a fifth term?

And curious too that, apparently, the announcement may even be scheduled for next week in preparation for elections in October.

With Formula 1 in chaos, riven by the worst crisis in its history, the teams up in arms, the commercial bloodlines strangled and television companies unsure about their future it would be difficult to vote with confidence for the man at the centre of that debacle.

But then that could just be conspiracy gobbledegook.

Or will we one day look back and reflect that the fatal blows were delivered, as they so often are, under cover of darkness?

Get more motorsport news and opinion, including driver diaries, on Mirror.co.uk's motorsport blog.

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