Mosley: Breakaway bid ‘won’t affect F1’

MOTORSPORT boss Max Mosley has said he expects the Formula One world championship to begin as usual in March with the eight Formula One Teams’ Association (FOTA) teams involved.

This in spite of the FIA, the motor sport’s world governing body, confirming it is to issue legal proceedings against Ferrari, McLaren, Renault, BMW Sauber, Toyota, Brawn GP, Red Bull Racing and Toro Rosso — following its threat to begin a breakaway series.

The eight members of FOTA announced on Thursday night they would not sign up to next year’s F1 world championship, and instead would now pursue a rival series. That, in part, was in retaliation to Ferrari instigating arbitration proceedings on Monday to protect their contractual rights with the FIA.

The row centres on plans by world motorsport boss Max Mosley to introduce budget cap proposals.

Mosley wants to introduce a voluntary £40 million (€47.2m) budget cap for teams to curtail a “financial arms race” in F1.

Despite the stalemate between the two sides, Mosley is convinced there will be a breakthrough.

“Always with these things in the end there is a compromise because they can’t afford not to run in the Formula One world championship, and we would be very reluctant to have that without them,” he said.

“But I don’t take this as seriously as some people do because it is all posturing and posing.

“It will all stop some time between the beginning of 2010 and March 2010 with the first race in Australia. It will all settle down and everybody will go racing.

“You have to remember we did all of this back in 1981. Bernie and I ran a rebel series.

“We started the World Federation of Motorsport, had a calendar of races, and we actually ran what the FIA described as a pirate race.

“But in the end we settled with the FIA and it was all peace in our time.

“We went much further than these people at the moment are talking about.”

Mosley, who is due to stand down as president in October, insists the row is encouraging him to stay on longer — despite the fact he turned 69 two months ago and is coming towards the end of a fourth term in office incorporating 16 years in charge of motor sport’s world governing body.

He said: “I don’t want to go on for too long, but the difficulty the teams are putting me in is that even if I wanted to stop in October, they are making it very difficult for me to do so.

“Everything they are doing is counter-productive. The people in the FIA are saying to me, ‘We’ve all this trouble, we’re being attacked. You must stay.’”

Mosley maintains the teams are trying to wrest control of the sport from the FIA, and the financial side from supremo Bernie Ecclestone.

That is not the case according to the teams, who simply want good governance, as Mosley attempts to get them to sign up for 2010 with no definitive regulations in place.