by Max Mosley
True, the Concorde Agreement meant the teams were contractually bound to race in the championship each season, but what else were they going to do? Bernie had all the TV and race contracts, and we, not the teams, had a binding contract with Bernie. One of the reasons for making both the Hundred Year Agreement and the earlier 15-year agreement with Bernie was to stop him (or whoever ended up owning his business) getting together with the teams to try to run outside the FIA’s structures.
In any event, the teams’ undertakings to compete were virtually worthless. There was no way to enforce them. An ordinary independent team would only stop competing in Formula One if it ran out of money, in which case there would be nothing left to sue. The car companies were the only participants with significant assets and therefore worth suing, but they were always careful to ensure that their Formula One team should sign the Concorde Agreement, never the main company. The team was disposable so it could break its agreement to race. It would always owe the main company more than the value of its assets and could be wound up if there were trouble. Bernie often tried to get the parent companies to sign up but they always refused. This was also the reason Luca failed to deliver the guarantees he had promised back in February 2009.
I always believed that Bernie and CVC would have been better off without a Concorde Agreement. Then the teams would have had to enter each year, like participants in any other international motor sport competition. They all needed to race in the Formula One World Championship because that’s what their sponsors wanted and, more importantly, except for the American IndyCar championship, there was no other comparable series. Any attempt to set one up was bound to fail for all the reasons already mentioned – and moving to IndyCar would have presented far too many technical, logistical and financial difficulties for it to be more attractive than Formula One, even if the FIA were in sole charge. IndyCar’s position in ACCUS and hence the FIA was another obstacle.
With no Concorde Agreement, the FIA had much more control over the Formula One rules, which would have allowed the introduction of a cost cap as I had planned in 2008 when Concorde had expired and had yet to be renewed. A well-judged cost cap would have made the teams profitable, demand for places in the World Championship would soon have exceeded supply, and each team would have had what amounted to a valuable franchise. Bernie and CVC might even have had to pay the teams less money in total.
The problem was that the financial world did not understand the fundamentals of Formula One (some of the analysts’ guidance in the EM.TV and Kirch days around the year 2000 was positively hilarious). To the financiers, a Concorde Agreement was a sine qua non. Just how limited is the financial world’s understanding is clear from the judgment in Bernie’s Constantin Medien case.4 You begin to see how the big investment banks regularly manage to lose billions by getting into things they don’t fully understand.
Following my disagreement with Bernie in the World Council in June 2008, the FIA had still not been given a complete draft of a new Concorde Agreement a year later. As a result, the 2008 and 2009 seasons ran without it. We could see no urgent need to sign. We only wanted to sign an agreement if Formula One and motor sport in general had some advantage from doing so. But with CVC under pressure from their banks and increasingly anxious to get it signed, Donald Mackenzie and Rolly Van Rappard, two of CVC’s three main partners, saw my refusal combined with the standoff with the teams as a major problem. They asked for a meeting in June 2009, to which Bernie came too.
They said I must resign my presidency of the FIA immediately to stop the breakaway, because they were at risk from their banks. I replied I didn’t have to do anything of the kind and that it was immaterial to the FIA whether we had CVC the other side of the table or a couple of people from their banks. It made no difference – the original 1995 agreement was still in place and the Hundred Year Agreement would follow on 1 January 2011. Who we dealt with didn’t matter – we were well protected by our contracts.
I did tell them I was not going to stand again in November but made it clear I would remain president and in charge until then. I told them they had no choice but to accept this. I added that I intended to get the Concorde Agreement signed before I stood down rather than leave my successor with a mess, and then told them I very much hoped the new president would be Jean Todt, whom I intended to support. This seemed to dismay them. I was fairly sure they had someone in mind for the FIA presidency and they definitely did not want Jean. I didn’t bother to ask who they were thinking of because I knew it would be someone unsuitable and, anyway, it was for the representatives of some 130 countries to decide, not Bernie and CVC.
When, as planned, I informed the FIA World Council a few days later that I was not going to stand again, Luca di Montezemolo, still Ferrari president, made some disobliging comments to the media after the meeting, despite an earlier agreement not to criticise one another. Irritated, I replied in kind and was widely quoted in the Italian press. I was briefly tempted to stand again just to make a point and prick the breakaway bubble, but realised I should not allow irritation to goad me. It was annoying that Luca claimed he had got rid of me and that some of the more gullible media actually believed him. The fact that my departure in November 2009 had been planned for years was completely ignored.
It was tempting to stay on just to show that Luca was talking nonsense, but there’s a limit to how much time it’s worth spending on something like that. After an exchange of insults (Luca called me a dictator, I said he was a mere bella figura), he rather disarmingly phoned and said: ‘Let’s be like football and call it a draw.’ We had, after all, known each other for nearly 40 years. I knew that what had really upset him was the double diffuser dispute earlier in the season, and I didn’t want an entirely impersonal technical matter to destroy what was left of our friendship.
Some weeks were then spent negotiating the Concorde Agreement. Ken Daly at Sidley Austin acted for the FIA. It was in place well before the November election. The negotiations were made easier because the FIA and the teams both wanted a relatively short-duration contract. Each suspected that CVC would want to sell its Formula One business as soon as the financial crisis was over and at that point CVC would need a much longer contract with both the FIA and the teams. The financial sector’s almost superstitious belief in the need for a Concorde Agreement and its consequent role as an essential element in a sale or IPO would demand a longer contract. This would give both the FIA and the teams an opportunity to extract significant money from Bernie and CVC. Relations with CVC eventually returned to something like normal and I felt I was leaving the FIA in reasonable shape.
Immediately after my announcement at the June 2009 World Council that I was not going to stand again, Ari Vatanen, a former MEP and world champion rally driver whom I knew well, visited me in Monaco. He said he was going to stand for the FIA presidency and would like my support. I told him I was backing Jean. There followed a rather disagreeable election campaign, with Ari’s camp making all sorts of claims – for example, that Jean was being allowed to use the FIA plane for his campaign. It was all completely untrue but created a needlessly unpleasant atmosphere. Ari even visited me for a second time in Monaco, seemingly to give me instructions about how to conduct the election. The inference that it might not be fair irritated me and I showed him the door.
In November 2009 I presided over my last FIA General Assembly. I had arranged for a French huissier de justice (a sort of bailiff) to be present and supervise the voting, to put its fairness beyond question. There was a small diversion when Ari’s son (he brought his family with him to the assembly) saw one of the club presidents put two ballot papers in the box. Ari immediately jumped up to protest vehemently but he had failed to acquaint himself with FIA statutes: a club that was responsible for both sport and touring in its country had a vote for each. Jean Todt defeated Ari in the election by a very substantial majority.
Jean had taken on a difficult job and later told me he found it much harder than he ha
d imagined. But he threw himself into it and has worked tirelessly ever since. Among other things he has, I believe, visited all the member countries of the FIA, a huge task on its own. Work occupies his entire day and beyond. The critics who sit on the sidelines for the most part have no idea what goes into a job like that. Interesting though it was, I felt a huge burden had been lifted when I stood down. It was not just the work, but also the feeling of responsibility whenever there was a serious accident. Now I was like an ordinary member of the public, hoping no one would get hurt and no longer having to ask myself could I perhaps have done more to prevent it.
29
CHEATING
At all levels of motor sport, cars are quite often excluded for breaches of the rules. The rules are complex and it’s easy to fall foul of them. But cheating, for me at least, is something different. It’s knowingly and deliberately breaking the rules in order to gain an advantage and taking steps to conceal what you are doing.
There is a view in some parts of motor sport, even Formula One, that cheating doesn’t matter as long as you don’t get caught. And, when someone does get caught, there’s always a group of apologists ready to excuse the team and claim that everyone does it so it doesn’t matter. The bigger the team, the louder the chorus will be.
A very unpleasant aspect of this is the pressure it puts on an honest competitor. If cheating is endemic, the honest competitor has either to start cheating too or endure constant defeat by unscrupulous rivals. This may seem obvious to someone from outside motor sport, but it is less glaring to some insiders. Eliminating deliberate rule-breaking must surely be a fundamental task for any governing body in sport.
The complexity of the cars in both racing and rallying provides many more opportunities for cheating than most sports afford. For me, the dividing line between deliberate rule-breaking and criminal financial fraud is a narrow one. Most cheating in top-level sport is fraudulent and brings or is intended to bring financial gain. Without being moralistic about it, it is difficult to see this as anything but crime.
Back in my March days, one of our mechanics reported he’d unthinkingly put his hand over the air restrictor on the engine of our works Formula Three car. To his astonishment, the engine had continued to run. The air restrictor was a device to limit power by requiring all the air entering the engine to pass through a hole of a certain size. The scrutineers would check that no air could enter the engine other than through the hole. To do this, they would seal the hole and then pump air out to check that the restrictor assembly could maintain a vacuum, thus proving that no air could reach the combustion chamber other than through the hole. When the scrutineers checked, the engine was always switched off because it obviously could not run when they had blocked the hole.
When the engine on our car was checked in the usual way, the scrutineers had found it held a vacuum as the rules required. So if the restrictor were blocked, no air could get in and the engine could not run. Yet our engine had run with the mechanic’s hand blocking the intake. Something was clearly very wrong.
Back at the factory, I asked him to dismantle the engine and investigate. It turned out that the engine supplier had fitted a very sophisticated valve system that was opened by oil pressure. When the engine was running, the valve was open and admitted extra air through a concealed hole in the manifold, giving an illegitimate power increase. But when the engine was not running there was no oil pressure and the valve was closed. As a result, when the scrutineers checked, they would find a perfect seal and no extra air reaching the engine.
I was very annoyed because it was our works team and we were legally responsible for the car, yet the engine supplier had not told me about his device. Had the scrutineers somehow found it rather than our mechanic, I would have been branded a cheat for the rest of my life. No one would have believed I didn’t know. I was so annoyed that I reported the engine supplier to the UK motor sport authorities instead of merely telling him not to do it, as I would have done had he asked me if it was OK.
But this was quite amateur compared to the Toyota factory team in the 1995 World Rally Championship. We caught them with an extraordinarily sophisticated cheat device. Again it involved letting extra air enter the engine, bypassing the restrictor. It was almost impossible to detect because it disappeared as soon as you gained access to the restrictor to check. The restrictor on a rally car was much harder to cheat than on a Formula Three car because the rally car had a turbocharger. On the engine side of the turbocharger, the air was above atmospheric pressure, so any leak would lose rather than gain power. If extra air was to be allowed in illegitimately, this had to be done in the very short distance between the air restrictor and the turbocharger.
Toyota’s device was a carefully machined circular element in the air restrictor assembly that could be pulled out against a very strong spring. When the component was examined, the spring held this circular element in place. The machining was perfect and it was impossible to see the join. The restrictor appeared normal and the hole was the correct size, but when the car was running it had a (legitimate) steel-reinforced pipe taking cold air to it. The secret device was pulled out against its spring so more air could get to the turbocharger and then held in place by a jubilee clip round the cold air pipe. The steel reinforcement was strong enough for the pipe to hold the device open against the spring. But if the cold air pipe was removed to allow the scrutineers to access and check the restrictor hole, the jubilee clip had to be undone and the device would immediately spring back into the closed position. All would appear to be in order.
It was like using a sophisticated computer algorithm for some illicit purpose and programming it to vanish without trace if anyone tried to look at it or investigate.
Jacques Berger, a young engineer who had come to work for FIA, found it. He called me because a senior FIA official at the event was saying the stewards should do nothing since we could not afford to lose Toyota from the World Championship. I felt there was a principle at stake and insisted on action. Toyota were excluded from the championship and were particularly unhappy when I explained the device to the media.
Back in my days running the Manufacturers’ Commission, rallying presented a major difficulty following Balestre’s ban on the ultra-fast Group B cars mentioned in chapter 17. From then on, only Group A cars could be used in the World Rally Championship. Group A were basically road cars that had been modified for rallying but not excessively so. Among other things, they were required to have a standard production turbocharger. (As explained in chapter 12, this is a device to pump air into the engine using a turbine driven by exhaust gasses. It increases efficiency and reduces fuel consumption but in a road car must also be suitable for quiet driving in city traffic.) For a car to be eligible to compete in the WRC, at least 5000 identical examples had to be produced including the standard turbocharger. This was to establish that the turbocharger fitted to the rally car really was a production item and not one specially made for competition.
The problem with the stipulation was that an ordinary production turbocharger restricted engine performance too much for rallies, while a turbocharger suitable for rallying made the car very difficult to drive in everyday use. Cars appeared at the rallies with big turbochargers and there was a suspicion that some manufacturers had not produced the necessary 5000 cars equipped with them because of their unsuitability for everyday use on the roads. However, it was considered impossible to prove. The question was: how could we even find, still less check, the 5000 cars?
I suggested asking each manufacturer for a list of the chassis numbers of the 5000 cars they had produced and sold with the big turbochargers. We would then take a random sample of cars that was big enough to give high statistical probability of revealing that not all the 5000 had been equipped with the big turbocharger, if this were indeed the case. Expert statisticians said that there would be a very high probability of finding a car with the wrong (i.e. standard, road-going) turbocharger if we looked at a random sample
of 100 from the 5000 cars supposedly fitted with the big turbocharger.
The plan was to trace each of the 100 cars in our sample through to the final customer (or showroom if it had not yet been sold) and pay a visit to ask if we could check the turbocharger. Faced with this, two car companies admitted they had not fitted their competition turbocharger to 5000 cars. One was European, the other Japanese. I felt really sorry for the Japanese competition manager. I had done this with the best of intentions but the consequences for the individual can be severe. OK, he shouldn’t have cheated, but it’s still somehow very sad to have messed up someone’s career. He probably felt he had to do it, which is why cheating is so pernicious.
Formula One’s tradition of cheating spanned its entire history, a favoured method being to run under weight. In the early days, some teams would qualify with a light car and then conceal lead in it at the end of the session before it was checked and weighed. When the officials finally caught on (long before my time in the FIA), things became more elaborate. The new trick was to bring the car in at the end of qualifying, take off the engine cover and other bits of bodywork and swap them for much heavier pieces before the car could be weighed. As a guest in one pit in the early 1980s, I went to move an engine cover blocking access to the loo, expecting it to be feather light. To my surprise I needed both hands and quite an effort to move it. It was the scrutineering – as opposed to qualifying – cover.
When the FIA got wind of this and sent officials to watch and make sure the same bodywork went back on the car after the last visit to the pits, the driver would stop out on the circuit and the mechanics would go to fetch it in a truck, taking the heavy bodywork with them. These tricks finally stopped when weighing equipment was installed at the entrance to the pit lane so the cars could be weighed at random, as they are today.