by Max Mosley
25
MORE TROUBLE IN FORMULA ONE
At times I felt almost besieged – as soon as one problem was solved, another immediately materialised. The next was a legal dispute with British American Tobacco over the appearance of their cars, which at least demonstrated that not all problems were buried deep beneath the bodywork. The point of conflict was the team’s desire for two distinct liveries on their two cars for two different brands. Despite a call from Kenneth Clarke, former Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer who was then a BAT board member and a Formula One enthusiast, we said no, it’s a two-car team and the rules say the cars should look substantially the same. BAT insisted on arbitration, as was their right under the Concorde Agreement.
Each side appointed an arbitrator – Anthony Grabiner and Jonathan Sumption, both top lawyers – who in turn appointed a neutral chairman. Our case was brilliantly argued by David Pannick QC and, against expectations, we won. BAT had a point in that multinational companies with several brands might be more likely to come into Formula One if they could promote two of them rather than one. We should have had a discussion and perhaps a rule change, but big companies sometimes too readily seek to impose their will without bothering to negotiate with a mere governing body.
We had yet more difficulties at the 1997 European Grand Prix, the last of the season, run on the Jerez circuit in southern Spain. Unusually, I was there and watching from a room in the control tower with (strangely) the opera singer Placido Domingo. During lap 48, we looked on as Michael Schumacher seemingly turned into Jacques Villeneuve’s Williams as it tried to overtake him. Michael was summoned to a hearing at the World Council, which happened to be convened on the day the story of Bernie’s £1 million donation to the British Labour Party broke. A media scrum surrounded Bernie and me when (unusually) we arrived together for the hearing and, although Schumacher lost his second place in the championship, the next day’s papers were full of Bernie’s £1 million with barely a mention of Michael.
Schumacher was also asked to spend seven days helping our road safety campaigns, a sort of community service for his offence. He did this willingly (and continued to help our campaigns long after the Jerez incident was forgotten). The only awkward moment came when he and I turned up for a road safety event in Warsaw and almost got caught (I’m ashamed to say) not wearing seatbelts in the back of the limo. We got them on just in time to avoid being photographed without them. He became the FIA’s number one ambassador for road safety and proved very adept at dealing with the media on safety matters. His example encouraged other drivers to join our campaigns.
Michael was an extraordinary talent. He also had an exceptional work ethic and would go back to the pits after dinner in the evening to talk to and encourage the mechanics working on his car. This was unusual and certainly contributed to the loyalty his team felt for him. He had a bad-boy image and was certainly very determined when racing. But in private he was charming, intelligent, somewhat insecure (surprising, given his extraordinary ability) and very interesting to talk to about Formula One. I used to have the occasional quiet dinner with him when I was in Geneva, close to where he lived. I always learned something from those conversations.
Schumacher won a second successive World Championship with Benetton in 1995 and there was pressure on him to complete the hat-trick when he joined Ferrari in 1996. (Ferrari had not won the drivers’ title since Jody Scheckter in 1979.) Even with Jean Todt now running the team, it took Ferrari some time to get going and things turned even more difficult for Michael when he crashed and broke his leg during the 1999 British Grand Prix at Silverstone. His championship chances slipped away during subsequent races, although he was able to return for the final two events and help his team-mate Eddie Irvine in the title fight with McLaren’s Mika Häkkinen. At the penultimate round in Malaysia, it was Ferrari’s turn to pose us a major problem.
All the cars, not just Ferrari, had a panel on each side of the chassis for aerodynamic reasons. These were nicknamed ‘barge boards’ by the teams because they looked as if they were there to protect the cars when they bumped into one another. In fact, it was an aerodynamic device. Like almost all the other parts of the cars, the panels were subject to strict rules. One particular dimension was determined by the ‘shadow’ the board cast over a sort of lip at its lower end when viewed from directly above.
One of the McLaren staff thought the lip on the Ferrari looked slightly too big and tipped off the FIA officials at the Malaysian Grand Prix. The cars were measured, found to be illegal and excluded, thus losing their first and second places. Ross Brawn, then in charge of engineering at Ferrari, in a surprising moment of frankness admitted to the media that the boards did indeed exceed the maximum permitted dimension. The boards were impounded and brought back to FIA headquarters pending the inevitable appeal.
The boards were grubby and covered with race debris but when, out of curiosity, I looked at one in my office it was clear that the lip was indeed too big. However, it was also immediately obvious that if the board had been at a slight angle to the chassis, rather than vertical, the dimension would have been legal because the ‘shadow’ would have been smaller. Someone from Ferrari came to check the boards prior to the appeal hearing and, sure enough, they noticed the same thing. They took the point and won the appeal – the FIA had no evidence concerning what the angle had been now the boards had been taken off the car.
With hindsight, we should have impounded the entire car. Inevitably, some commentators suggested we had influenced the court to favour Ferrari. We never did but it was impossible to convince a partisan Formula One fan that the appeal system was genuinely fair – and the criticism came the other way round when, for example, we acquitted McLaren at the first ‘spygate’ hearing, of which more later. Sadly, one of the cleaners got hold of the boards and cleaned off all the race debris, so what would have been a souvenir for the FIA head office is no longer so authentic.
A short time later, I was very surprised when, at a reception at the Turin motor show, Gianni Agnelli thanked me for the decision. That he thought I had, or even could have, influenced it one way or the other really worried me. I tried to explain that the FIA International Court of Appeal consisted of senior lawyers who all had knowledge of motor sport but no connection with me or with any competitor. A judge was not even allowed to be from the same country as any party to the appeal. I also told him that, out of more than 30 members of the court, I only knew two personally. I did my best to persuade him that the court was entirely independent of the FIA administration but I’m not sure he was entirely convinced.
The court had, of course, been completely reconstituted since the days when one of the car companies had somehow managed to record Balestre telling me on the telephone that he controlled it. Initially, a French lawyer managed the court, then David Ward took over, but from 2007 it was supervised by an independent external lawyer, usually Ken Daly from Sidley Austin. The judges were all elected by the FIA member organisations and were the sort of people who would have been outraged had I, or anyone from the administration, contacted them, directly or indirectly, to suggest what they should decide. Anyone with knowledge of the UK Bar, for example, would have known that the idea of me calling up either of the two British judges (Anthony Scrivener and Edwin Glasgow, both eminent QCs) to suggest what they should decide would be nothing short of absurd. Given all that effort, it was disappointing that anyone should think the court was not fully independent.
Some of the Formula One teams fed this deceit by constantly carping about the court and questioning its independence with the media. So, shortly after David took over we decided to open the court to the press. This was strongly opposed by Maître Loitron, the very distinguished French lawyer on whom we relied for guidance on questions of French law. He said we’d regret it and, as luck would have it, the very first case open to the press was indeed a bit of a disaster.
In 2001, after finishing fourth, Jarno Trulli’s Jordan had been
excluded from the United States Grand Prix for a breach of technical regulations. But the steward who needed to sign the order had left early to chair a meeting next day in Europe, so someone else had signed his name on his behalf. Eddie Jordan and his team discovered this and appealed, claiming the order was a forgery. Things were further complicated when Eddie paid the deposit accompanying the notice of appeal with dollar bills so old they were no longer legal tender. When the case came before the Court of Appeal, the FIA had to throw in its hand because of the irregularity of the signature. Fortunately, only one journalist turned up for the hearing and he wrote a very funny account of it. But the principle of open justice was now established and the press could see for itself how the court worked. After a few more hearings, the media began to recognise the professionalism and independent legal expertise of the court.
When the 2001 attack on the New York World Trade Center happened, we were in the middle of a South American congress in Peru. The whole of North American airspace was immediately shut down and everyone from Europe who had travelled via Miami, the conventional route, was stuck in South America. Fortunately, I had avoided Miami (always a wise precaution) and flown direct to Lima from Madrid. Although it was a shocking act of terrorism, the degree of panic was surprising, not just in America but elsewhere. Even Michael Schumacher went round the drivers the following weekend at Monza urging everyone to refuse to go to the next race at Indianapolis for fear of an incident.
The suggested boycott didn’t materialise but I was quite annoyed. It was our job, not Michael’s, to call off a Grand Prix if there were a threat. Also, given the level of hysteria, I thought a big sporting event at Indianapolis, in the heart of the American Midwest, would be one of the safest places you could imagine in the coming weeks. The security might be over the top (indeed, warplanes flew overhead during the race) but the risk of a terrorist incident would be negligible – and so it turned out.
However hard you try to be even-handed between all participants, I don’t think it will ever be possible to convince the most committed Formula One fan that the system is fair if a decision is taken which is perceived as disadvantageous to their favourite team. A good example of this was the 2003 tyre controversy. The rules stipulated a maximum tread width for the tyre. We discovered, however, that Michelin had so constructed theirs that it conformed when measured in the garage but took on a mushroom-like shape when the car was running, making the contact patch wider than permitted. We stopped this as we thought it was a clear infringement. To this day, McLaren fans accuse the FIA of having done it to help Ferrari, who were on a different make of tyre. It reminded me of Lyndon B. Johnson’s maxim about a jackass in a hailstorm: ‘Nothing to do but stand there and take it.’
Apart from the larger conflicts, there was a never-ending succession of smaller disputes. These were almost always accompanied by outraged comments from the supporters of whichever team was perceived to have come off the worst. The supporters often included journalists, some of whom would not even bother to pick up the phone and ask for the FIA’s side of the question. Aside from the technical and sporting disputes, there were arguments whenever we tried to reduce costs in the interests of the less well-funded teams.
After more than ten years of this, I started to ask myself if I really wanted to go on. I was spending all my time trying to solve other people’s problems, and often getting roundly abused or even sued for doing so. Was this really the best way of spending my time now I was into my sixties? Much of the job was fascinating and I could at least exert considerable influence. But, in the end, Formula One was not my personal problem and exercising power for its own sake was never my thing. The aggravation was beginning to outweigh the appeal.
But sometimes I could at least get my own back on a journalist. My son Alexander had a maths doctorate and had won a prize from Linux for his work on open-source software for computers. As a result, he was able to help me by finding a way to make fun of a Formula One magazine that kept writing inaccurate and hostile articles about me. He set up a site that looked similar to the magazine’s own website and arranged that anyone searching for the magazine, or the name of its editor, would be taken to our site and find my counterattack. Sometime later, Bernie (whom I suspected of being much closer to the magazine than he admitted) invited the editor and me to lunch to make peace. Bernie asked him why he had always been so hostile to me. He said it was because I had sent people to go through his dustbins. Bernie surprised him (and me) by saying, ‘That wasn’t Max, that was me!’
26
A BREAKAWAY?
By 2002 the costs of competing in Formula One had become prohibitively and perilously excessive. In the 1990s, a very serious accident, particularly one involving spectators, seemed the greatest threat to Formula One but, in the following decade, inordinate cost seemed to me increasingly the problem most likely to destroy the World Championship.
So much of the expenditure was profligate. For example, qualifying cars were a particularly crazy waste of money. Teams were preparing special cars just to qualify for their grid position, fitting special engines that delivered great power but lasted only about 50 km – just enough for one or two really fast laps and a good grid position. Those who could afford it also set their cars up with special bodywork and little or no cooling for engine and brakes. This gave much better aerodynamics but meant the car could do very few laps before overheating. Overnight before the race, the car would be completely rebuilt, with a fresh engine, proper bodywork and the normal cooling systems. It would then be able to run for 300 km in the race. I thought this absurdly expensive and quite unnecessary. Why not simply qualify the car you race?
At the FIA’s invitation, the teams spent the autumn of 2002 discussing cost reduction in their own private meetings. There were plenty of possibilities quite apart from the qualifying cars, yet nothing was agreed. One of the team principals joked that they couldn’t even agree which sandwiches to order, so in January 2003 I met the teams and announced the FIA was going to exercise its right to put the cars in parc fermé after qualifying. The cars would then be released in time for the race.
This meant a team could not change its car after qualifying and any team that hoped to finish the race would have to qualify with its car in race trim. Before doing this, I had made sure that some of them were in favour. However rational your arguments, it is never wise to take them all on at once. When I made my announcement, the atmosphere in the meeting was extraordinary. One of the team principals seemed to go into a sort of catatonic trance and I began to worry that he might have a seizure, but ultimately all was well and the meeting ended with acrimony but no casualties.
Because the power to put a car in parc fermé was already in the rules (where it had probably been since before the Second World War), we could just do it. We didn’t need a rule change, so didn’t need the agreement of the teams, but McLaren and Williams disputed our right to act. They announced that it was not, as we claimed, a procedural measure and we were effectively changing the rules. They held a press conference with an international TV link and announced they had started arbitration proceedings against the FIA under the Concorde Agreement to stop us.
They explained that by preventing the mechanics from working on the cars on Saturday night we were putting the drivers’ lives at risk, and claimed we were misusing a very old rule that was there for a different purpose. It was a concerted effort to thwart our attempts to stop waste and save them money. At one point, Frank Williams (who always remained a friend even when he disagreed) called me and said: ‘But Max, I’ve been changing my engine on Saturday night for the last forty years.’ When I said this was straight from the ‘we’ve always done it that way’ school of management, he could see the funny side despite the conflict. In the end, after some sensible discussions on detail, a rule was agreed and the arbitration proceedings were quietly abandoned.
Interestingly, shortly after this rule – sorry, procedural measure – came in, we had the first Grand
Prix for more than 40 years in which every car finished. So much for the safety argument – I always thought it was much better that team personnel should get a good night’s sleep before the stresses of race day, pit stops and so on, rather than be fiddling with the cars most of Saturday night. Nowadays, I don’t think you would find one person in the paddock who would want to go back to qualifying cars.
Still on costs, in May the following year I called a meeting of the Formula One engine manufacturers during the Monaco Grand Prix. Seven major car companies were now involved in supplying engines for the World Championship. Norbert Haug, in charge of the Mercedes racing programme, confirmed that, between them, the manufacturers were spending more than €1.5 billion (billion, not million!) annually, just for the engines. Everyone in the meeting agreed this was grossly excessive.
From a philosophical point of view, it was quite difficult to convince engineers from the big car companies to agree to restrictions. For example, the then CEO of Honda had explained to me one evening in Japan that they were intrinsically wrong and, apart from a limit on capacity, the only restrictive engine rule he would readily agree to was a ban on oval pistons. As a young engineer, he had successfully developed oval pistons for Honda’s racing motorcycles and knew how fiendishly difficult the work had been. (Oval pistons allow more valves, thus better breathing and more power.)