JULY 9, 2005

Mosley: It will all blow over

FIA President Max Mosley made an appearance at the British Grand Prix, his first since Monaco seven weeks ago, and admitted that some of his recent decisions have not pleased the Formula 1 teams.

"Some of the teams definitely want me out," he said. "The thing is that I think it will repair itself. The thing about a breakaway is that everybody can look at the US and see what happened when CART and IRL split up. If we have a breakaway I should think certainly two, maybe three manufacturers would stop. They'd just say this isn't what we came into F1 for. Better we stop. So I think when they think about it, if they actually confronted the reality of doing it, they would see that it won't work. When it actually comes to it, they won't do it."

Talk to some of the manufacturers however and they say that Mosley is underestimating them, just as he underestimated their unity at Indianapolis, believing, so they say, that some of the teams would race despite the safety fears and that this would break up the alliance which stands against him at the moment. That did not happen and the subsequent World Council meeting has simply served to drive the rebels still closer to one another. Several team bosses reported amazing unity at the meetings this week in Munich. When there were differences of opinion they were discussed rationally and compromises were made.

Mosley is talking about compromise - which is not a stupid thing to do given his political isolation - and it is worth noting that the draft rules published recently did include a testing restriction and a control tyre in 2008, which pleased the teams but there are still other proposals which are unacceptable to the teams because they restrict development too much.

Further compromise is going to be needed to stop F1 blowing apart and it will be a measure of Mosley's character to see whether he can compromise without worrying about losing face.