Wagging the Dog

It seemed like it wasn't quite a done deal for a moment, but Force India have now confirmed that Vitantonio Liuzzi will replace Giancarlo Fisichella at Monza. Those who have long wondered whether he got a fair crack of the whip at Toro Rosso will be pleased to see him get a second chance with Vijay Mallya's team, which appears much improved of late. Certainly it will be interesting to see how he stacks up against Adrian Sutil, who to me remains one of the great enigmas of the F1 grid. Devastatingly quick on his day, especially if said day is very wet, he nonetheless has failed to establish himself as consistently quicker than Fisichella, even as the Italian appears to be coasting towards retirement.

There are those who think that Liuzzi is really rather special. Joe Saward, who has long been a cheerleader for Liuzzi, pointed to his karting performance in a recent article on his blog. Clive Allen has long championed his former team mate at Toro Rosso, Scott Speed, and by extension, must presumably think Liuzzi too was under-valued. It is true, after all, that he was as quick as Sebastian Vettel when they were teamed together at the end of 2007, and he was utterly dominant when he took the final F3000 title in 2004. Against that, it could be argued that the 2004 F3000 field wasn't exactly the strongest the category had ever known, and that while he was as quick as Vettel, Vettel was taking his first steps in F1, while Liuzzi had considerable F1 experience. It will be interesting to see how he fares.

It appears, however, that one Bernie Ecclestone Esq. thinks that Mallya's Force India have chosen the wrong man for the job. He's expressed 'disappointment' that the team have chosen Liuzzi over GP2 racer Karun Chandhok. Now let's not beat about the bush. Chandhok might be perfectly capable of putting in a respectable performance in an F1 car. In the way that Tiago Monteiro, or Giorgio Pantano, or his fellow-countryman Narain Karthikeyan were. There is no way, however, that he would be top of anyone's list of potential future F1 megastars. If it were down to potential alone, he wouldn't even be in my top 10 list of candidates for the vacant seat at Force India. After all, he spent last year being soundly beaten by team mate Bruno Senna at ISport, and in the end, nobody took on Senna, despite his having perhaps the most marketable surname in motorsport. This year, he's generally been out-paced by team mate Alvaro Parente at Ocean Racing Technology, and it's fair to say that Parente himself probably isn't at the top of F1 team bosses' shopping lists either. Among the current GP2 drivers alone, I'd have thought Hulkenberg, Di Grassi and Petrov, to name three, were more obvious candidates for an F1 drive.

To be fair, Ecclestone was talking to the Hindustan Times when he was touting Chandhok for the Force India seat, so he might simply have been playing to the gallery. If there's more to it than that, though, I can only assume Ecclestone's desire to see Chandhok in an F1 car is driven by marketing, rather than sporting, considerations. After all, he's been trying to get a Indian Grand Prix off the ground for some time - or rather, he's been trying to persuade the Indians to pay to host a Grand Prix. He was knocked back last week, when The Indian Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sport vetoed a payment from Indian Grand Prix promoter JPSK Sports to Formula One Administration, saying that Formula 1 is fundamentally a commercial entertainment and not a sport. Now, perhaps he thinks that an Indian driver in a competitive Indian car (albeit one built near Silverstone in the UK) will help to change the Indian Government's mind.

Ironic then, that Ecclestone should be pushing for a driver not on the grounds of his sporting prowess, his ultimate pace, or his experience, but on the basis that he's trying to sell the sport to 1 billion Indians (or, rather, perhaps, to whoever signs the cheques there) and could do with a driver of the right nationality to help close the deal. It might be the right decision if we're in the entertainment business, but from a sporting point of view, I can't quite see the logic. Looks like the entertainment tail wagging the sporting dog.

Of course, the lower reaches of the F1 grid has long had its share of drivers there for reasons other than pace alone. If your car is 3 or 4 seconds of the pace, there's little point in putting a guy who can get the last couple of tenths out of it, when money's in short supply and there's someone offering to bring pots of sponsorship cash to the party in exchange for a seat. After all, everyone has to pay the bills. For years, the team now known as Force India has adopted this policy, handing at least one of its cars over to whoever could write the largest cheque whilst still persuading the FIA he was worthy of a superlicence.

Now though, the situation is a little different. Yes, if the rumours are true, they're having cashflow problems and both Ferrari and Mercedes are owed money for their engines. But of late, the VJM02 has been a lot closer to the ultimate pace. Enough to grab pole position in Spa. Enough to start racking up significant points. And under the Concord agreement, points, or rather, one's position in the Constructors' Championship, mean prizes. Having the right driver in the car begins to really matter. And to be blunt, Chandhok was not the right driver. Liuzzi, though? He might well be. Whatever Bernie might think, for those running the team, it's still a sport.

What Goes Around Comes Around...

It was nearly thirty years ago, when then Brabham owner Bernie Ecclestone, in his capacity as president of the Formula One Constructors Association (FOCA) went into battle with Jean-Marie Balestre’s FISA for the rights to run Formula 1. His right-hand man in that fight was an urbane barrister whose real ambitions lay in politics, but whose family history made such a career impossible. He chose instead, to go into the goldfish bowl world of motorsports administration. Step forward current FIA president Max Mosley. It was a tense, and bitterly fought affair which at times appeared to threaten to tear the sport apart. In the end, Ecclestone and Mosley emerged victorious, with FOCA, representing the teams, being granted control over the commercial aspects of the sport. Mosley, meanwhile, dethroned Balestre and became president of the organisation he had spent much of the last decade at war with – the FIA.

Fast forward to the present day, and the state of the sport that the two men have largely controlled for the past two decade. It has been a tumultuous few months for Formula One. At the time of writing, it remains unclear whether the men and women at the old Honda F1 factory team in Brackley will be looking for work, and whether Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello, race-winners both, will have a ride this year. It is thought that Mexican billionaire and Grand-Am racing boss Carlos Slim has sniffed around. Rumour has it that both PSA (Peugeot-Citroen) and Hyundai took at least a cursory look purchasing the team but both have publicly ruled themselves out, and the clock is ticking if a deal is to be done in time to get the team onto the grid in Australia at the end of March. There are rumours that Prodrive supreme David Richards is still trying to put together a bid with Middle Eastern backers (although he now says he is not interested), but in the current economic climate, nothing can be taken for granted.

Fundamentally, the problem is that the team requires a vast amount to run. Honda, it is said, are happy to be rid of it for a nominal sum, but will want to be indemnified against future redundancy costs for the team’s current employees. Dieter Rencken, in his excellent Autosport column, The Weekly Grapevine (do subscribe, it’s fantastic value – and they don’t pay me to say so...) estimated the cost of providing such guarantees at around £75m. And on top of that sum, any prospective team owner would have to find the cash to run the team itself for the season – which would probably cost at least as much again, cost-cutting measures notwithstanding. The fundamental truth is that the cost of getting started as an F1 team is now so great as to be beyond all but the wealthiest corporations and individuals.

Teams have always come and gone, but in times past, there has always been a plentiful supply of aspirants in F2, or F3000, or sportscar racing prepared to take the leap of jumping up into Formula One. That is no longer the case. The blame must lie, in part, with Bernie Ecclestone, the FIA and FOM, with their insistence that any new team put up a bond of $30m and the ‘closed shop’ franchise system which has existed for the past ten years. That, though, is not the whole of the explanation. Such a system should actually have served to protect the existing weaker teams, but it was not enough to save Prost, Arrows or Minardi. As I have said on numerous occasions before, the cost of competing in F1 will always be a certain fraction of what the richest teams and prepared and able to spend. Over the past decade and a half, that sum has become so large, and so detached from the figures required to compete in other, lesser formulae, that the jump has become to great.

In years past, teams like ART, ISport, or Racing Engineering might have taken the leap into F1, but the start-up costs are simply so much greater than for GP2 as to make this completely unrealistic. Not since Forti Corse, Simtek and Pacific have there been completely new-start F1 teams which haven’t had the backing of either a major corporation with a product to sell (BAR and British American Tobacco) or a car manufacturer (Toyota). None of these, of course, were able to make much of a fist of it. The last completely new teams to come into the sport without the backing of a manufacturer or cigarette company and make a lasting impression were Jordan (in 1991) and Sauber (in 1993). What, you might say, of Super Aguri and Toro Rosso? Well, I can’t help but feel that, given they didn’t design their own cars, they don’t really count.

For a long time, the sport has been able to ignore this, as the existing manufacturer teams have appeared to be on a sound footing. Ford (as Jaguar) might have pulled out, but billionaire soft-drinks magnate Dietrich Mateschitz was able to step into the breach to keep that team going. Now though, with the world in the throes of what might be the most severe economic recession since the 1930s, it’s looking as if the grid for 2009 might well be down to 18 cars, and there are persistent rumours about Williams’ indebtedness, that Renault and Toyota are reconsidering their involvement in the sport, and that Vijay Mallya is becoming disillusioned with the lack of success from Force India. In short, F1 may be facing a crisis which threatens its very existence.

Those involved in the sport are not unaware of this, but they have massively divergent visions of how F1 might dig itself out of the hole it has found itself in. On the one hand, there is FOM’s vision, seemingly shared by FIA President Max Mosley. They look at the current situation and see 10 (perhaps now 9) teams spending astronomical sums on esoteric technology with little or no application in the world beyond, all in search of a few tenths of a second. Then they look at GP2 – the cars are not much slower, the racing is arguably better, and a team can be run for a tiny fraction of the cost of a Formula 1 team. Why? Because the cars are built to a standard design, and the teams are simply not allowed to spend millions

The teams, however, are all but united in opposition to this vision. They realise that, ultimately, it would render them much less powerful than they are at present. Once they are left running more or less standard chassis and engines, the teams would become like so many interchangeable light-bulbs. At present, the teams are real players in themselves. If they unite in opposition to the commercial rights holder or the FIA, then those bodies are forced to listen – the show cannot go on without them. If they were reduced to small engineering firms, doing nothing more than setting up a spec-formula chassis and providing mechanics, in essence, doing what GP2 teams do now, then the governing body would hold the whip hand. If the teams fell out with those running the sport, well, the governing body could go and find others to run the cars – there would be no need to compromise with them.

Being fair, I think the teams fundamentally see F1 as a competition between rival teams of engineers, as well as between rival drivers. They, quite correctly in my view, regard a spec formula as being contrary to the very spirit of the sport. Their preferred solution is a rule book which, while perhaps closing down development in certain areas, nonetheless leaves the door open for the teams to compete to build the most effective racing car. Arguably, at least, central to making this vision work is that the teams should get a larger share of the revenues generated by the sport’s owners from the selling of TV rights, track-side advertising and the rights to host races in the first place.

Inevitably, this sets the teams at loggerheads with the sport’s commercial rights holders. Bernie Ecclestone remains their fixer, though he has only a minority stake in FOM (and that through his estranged wife’s Bambino Trust), which is mostly owned by the hugely indebted private equity firm, CVC. The teams might reasonably ask what additional value the sport’s owners actually bring to the table. When CVC took over Moto GP, they took on a decidedly different proposition. MotoGP had great unrealised potential – the sport had a very low media profile, and yet there was no fundamental reason it could not be every bit as commercially successful as F1. Under CVC’s ownership, MotoGP largely fulfilled this potential. F1 is a different kettle of fish. Bernie Ecclestone et al had been doing a perfectly good job of promoting the sport for the past 30 years, and it has probably reached about as large a global market as it is ever going to. If CVC were to make more money, it would have to be from the sport’s existing base.

The teams' bones of contention with FOM are several. Firstly, the teams are competing with the rights holders for sponsorship money. Not a few teams will feel aggrieved at the fact that FOM have signed LG Electronics as ‘commercial partners’ - in the past, they might instead have sponsored a team. If further deals follow, expect the teams to feel still more frustrated. Secondly, FOM/CVC, in their quest to maximise their own revenues (and pay back the interest on the rather hefty loan CVC took out to purchase the rights from one Mr Ecclestone) are ever more inclined to have Grands Prix wherever there’s a backer (usually a Government) prepared to pay. Hence, Grands Prix next year in Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and China, but none in Canada, France or the USA and Britain and Germany under threat. Which is madness from the teams’ point of view, because they want the races in places which would interest potential sponsors, and Abu Dhabi is not such a place. It is, of course, also a travesty from the fan’s point of view. Finally, there's the profits themselves. The teams would argue that they shoulder most of the burden of investing in the sport and incur most of the costs - the commercial rights holder, which not being responsible for providing the cars or the circuits, essentially getting something for nothing, and yet they receive only half of the sport's revenues (with Bernie having stated he'd like to cut that figure back, rather tahn increase it). The thought must occur to them that, were they to go it alone and set up a break-away championship, they could keep all those revenues for themselves.

It strikes me that the interests of the teams, and probably ultimately the sport itself, is diametrically opposed to that of the sport’s commercial rights holders, still operating through Mr Ecclestone, and the FIA, which, through Max Mosley, seems squarely lined up behind them. Through FOTA (are the echoes of the old FOCA in their name deliberate), the teams would appear to have put many of their differences aside to come together to make common cause. Will they succeed? Not many have gone up against Mr Ecclestone and won, but on the other hand, Bernie is only human, and he’s 78 now. Without any longer having a large personal financial stake in the sport, essentially the pawn of a group of investment bankers, will he really have the stomach for the fight, or might Mr Ecclestone and Mr Mosley’s long reign over the sport come to an end, just as Jean Marie Balestre’s did nearly two decades ago?

Points Mean Prizes?

In recent years, there has been a seemingly irresistible urge on the part of F1's governing body to meddle with Formula 1's rulebook. It reminds me of nothing so much as a hyperactive child who can't stop fidgeting, and as with the hyperactive child, I wonder how much of it is simply about trying to get attention.

I'm not talking about the technical regulations, which have always had to be amended every year or two, in an effort to keep one step ahead of the teams constant fight to make their cars ever faster. What I've become increasingly tired of is the constant fiddling with the format of the race weekend itself. It started in 2003, with the introduction of single-lap qualifying on race fuel and a change to the points-scoring system to award points to the first 8 finishers, rather than the first 6. Then, in quick succession, we had knock-out qualifying, the one-tyre-per-race rule, two race engines and a host of other rule adjustments which it seems only serve to make the sport more confusing (though regular readers will know that I happen to be in favour of the one-tyre rule).

The latest proposal, this time from Bernie Ecclestone rather than the blazers at the FIA, is that the points system for deciding the driver's championship should be done away with entirely and replaced with a 'medals' system, similar to that used (albeit only informally) to decide the winning country in the Olympics. My first reaction on hearing the news was that this was just Bernie floating a daft idea to get a bit of press coverage over the winter, though it now seems he's more serious about it than that. One can't help but wonder if Mr Ecclestone has been impressed by the Festival of Minor Sports' ability to extract sums from Governments to host the event that dwarf even F1's deals with such motorsporting capitals as, um, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain.

Bernie has claimed that his proposed system for deciding the world championship is preferable to the current points-system because it will reward drivers for going all out for the win, rather than settling meekly for a good points finish rather than risking an accident in search of victory. Too many races, he argues, become dull processions because there's little incentive for title contenders to run the risk of actually racing each other. As the idea seems to be gaining some traction, I think it's worth explaining what is wrong with it, why it is not the answer to the problem which Bernie has identified.

The first, and most glaring problem is that under Bernie's 'medal' system, all places below 3rd become an irrelevance from the point of view of the driver's title. If the title contenders are fighting over 4th or 5th places, the result will be of no consequence. The battle between Massa and Hamilton at Monza this year wouldn't have counted for anything, neither would drives through the field by the pair of them at Fuji. Far from giving drivers more incentive to really race, it actually gives them less in some circumstances.

The second problem, in my eyes, is that it utterly rules out the possibility of a quick, consistent driver sneaking away with the title in an inferior car. This year, Robert Kubica remained in the title battle until the penultimate round in a car that really had no business being there - by being consistent and by always extracting the most from what he had. Come to that, I still think Kimi Raikkonen's best season in F1 came back in 2003, when he nearly stole the title from under Michael Schumacher's nose in a year old Mclaren. He only won one race, but then in the Mclaren MP4/17, that year, it was about as much as anyone could hope to achieve. That he nearly won the title anyway, was testament to an unerring consistency in a year when all his major rivals let points-scoring opportunities slip through their fingers.

That said, it is worth noting as Mark Hughes did in Autosport last week, that prior to this year, the 'medals' system would not actually have resulted in a different driver being crowned champion since 1989, when it would have handed the title to the faster but more erratic Ayrton Senna over his slower but more consistent team mate, Alain Prost. Who would have made the more worthy champion that year? A tough call, but it's certainly not obvious that Bernie's proposed method for deciding the drivers title produces fairer, more representative results. In fact, mostly, it produces exactly the same result - it just means the championship gets decided earlier. In 2003, for example, Schumacher, rather than fighting Montoya and Raikkonen right down to the wire, would have wrapped up the title with four or five rounds to go!

I happen to agree with Bernie Ecclestone that the current F1 points system does not adequately reward victories. A Grand Prix winner takes away only two more points than the guy who finishes second. And the difference between finishing first and second is the same as the difference between finishing second and third. The solution to this, though, is not to rewrite the rules so as to disregard any finish lower than a 3rd place, but instead to change the points system so as to reward wins more. The scoring system used by the World Rally Championship for many years - of 20-15-12-10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 would be ideal in my view. Ironically, of course, the points system used to reward race wins more in the days when a win got 10 points and a second place got 6, but that was changed in 2003 (it is widely thought at Bernie's behest) because it was felt that it resulted in the title being decided too early, after Schumacher dominated 2002 to such a degree that he had the title in the bag by early August.

Bernie Ecclestone's medals idea sounds to me like a cheap gimmick, and I don't believe it will do anything to improve the quality of the racing we see. Making overtaking easier might achieve that. Overzealous stewarding has much to answer for too. Not penalising drivers every time they go out on a limb and try to make a pass that doesn't quite come off would certainly encourage drivers to race each other. Let's hope the World Motorsport Council show sense when they meet next week and treat this idea with the contempt it deserves.

A Race At The Park?

I'm noticing something of a pattern developing where the really unexpected F1 stories have a habit of breaking while I'm on holiday and catching me unawares. A couple of years ago, I remember sitting in a bar in Bordeaux, leafing through a copy of Le Monde and wondering whether Juan Montoya was could possibly be walking out on Mclaren to go stock car racing or whether my rusty A-level French was a lot worse than I thought.

Last Saturday morning, I was enjoying a leisurely breakfast at the Ceilidh Place up in Ullapool (A place I do recommend should you ever find yourself in that part of the world) and leafing through the famously parochial Press and Journal (a rather peculiar semi-national newspaper which, it is said, though probably apocryphally, reported the sinking of the Titanic with the headline "Aberdeen Man Lost At Sea") when I stumbled upon a story that the British Grand Prix is to move to Donington Park from 2010. My first reaction was to wonder whether the paper had just got it wrong.

Now I rather like Donington, and the last time I went to a Grand Prix in the UK, it was to the sole previous post-war F1 race at Donington, where I stood in the rain at the bottom of the Craner Curves and watched my childhood hero Ayrton Senna drive arguably the finest race of his life. Nonetheless, I can't help but feel that Donington is not the place for modern F1 cars.

Put simply the track is too tight, too twisty and lacks the long straights needed to enable overtaking in today's Grand Prix cars, at least in the dry. The only really slow corners on the track, the Melbourne Hairpin, the Esses and Goddards, all lack the kind of long straights which enable a driver to pull off a pass. A 21st Century F1 car might look absolutely incredible through the sweeping Craner Curves, but the vagaries of aerodynamics are such that a following car would never get close. There is little chance that Raikkonen, Alonso or Hamilton could emulate Senna's fantastic first lap pass of Karl Wendlinger there, not because they lack Senna's ability, but because their equipment simply wouldn't allow for it.

There is talk that the circuit will be extended, by a half a mile or so, but Simon Gillett's talk on during the ITV coverage last weekend of building in a "second Craner curves" leaves me fearing that what Donington's bosses have in mind is the addition of a further technical, twisty section which will do nothing to alleviate the problems with passing. A substantial programme of track widening may help a little, but is unlikely to deal with the fundamental problem.

Of course, it is entirely possible that such concerns are academic, and that the announcement that the British Grand Prix will head to the Derbyshire circuit is nothing more than another move in the long running war of attrition being fought between Bernie Ecclestone and the BRDC over the upgrading of Silverstone. After all, it wasn't so long ago that stories were circulating that the British Grand Prix would be off to Brands Hatch (another wonderful race track sadly utterly unsuited to modern F1 as anyone who has watched the processional A1GP races there will know.) Furthermore, the financing of the whole Donington venture sounds woefully opaque and the question of quite what they have up their sleeves that Silverstone cannot match remains unanswered. And that's before we even get onto the question of planning permission.

Having said all that, while I'm not convinced by Donington as an F1 venue, it remains a great race track, with a variety of corners and gradient change and enough passing places for categories such as the British Touring Car Championship and less powerful single seaters - there have been a number of really rather entertaining F3 races here. One of the most memorable races I ever saw there was - of all things - a one make race for old-model Renault 5s that cascaded through the Craner Curves three, sometimes four abreast (it probably helped that the cars weren't worth much - club drivers who fear the cost of a write-off tend not to be so carefree...)

The circuit also played host to the first ever visit of the German Touring Car Championship to the UK back in the early 1990s. It may not have been a classic race (I was keeping my fingers crossed for a Steve Soper victory but the Audi 100s of a young Frank Biela and an aging Hans Stuck were simply too quick for the BMW runners. Nonetheless, it was a sight well worth seeing - not least because by that time the big banger Sierra Cosworth's were gone from the British championship and the race represented the only opportunity to see really big, powerful touring cars in the UK (oh, and Gerd Ruch's weird Ford Mustangs, which were certainly big, though they didn't seem very powerful, or at least not very quick).

Donington was also the scene of some very memorable Group C races in the late 1980s and earl;y 1990s. Given the size and power of late 80s sportscars, you might wonder how they can race around Donington when lighter, more nimble F1 cars would, in my view at least, seriously struggle. The answer lies partly in the fact that the aerodynamics of sportscars, especially of that era, was much more primitive and did not make close running through fast corners nearly so difficult and partly in the very different nature of the racing. Where single seater racing is to a significant extent about wheel to wheel racing and passing on the track, sportscar racing, especially in the Group C era, was much more down to slick pit work and fuel economy. A lack of overtaking opportunities on the track never quite mattered so much.

It is perhaps no surprise therefore that, in recent years Donington has been best known for hosting events like the old FIA Sports Car Championship, the ill-fated European Le Mans Series and, perhaps most successfully, the FIA GT Series. Ironically, it has now lost the blue riband sportscar and GT races to Silverstone - the very circuit which has supposedly lost the GP to Donington. Its the wrong way round, all told. F1 cars need the fast wide open spaces of Silverstone to be seen to their best effect, while I for one would much rather watch sports and prototype cars through the sweeping Craner curves than the equally exhilarating but less spectator-friendly Maggots/Becketts complex.

My worst fear, though, is that something similar to the A1-Ring fiasco might befall the Donington circuit. The A1-Ring was a moderately interesting, if unexceptional circuit in Austria, located near the site of the old Zeltweg track. Its owner, Red Bull CEO Dietrich Mateschitz had grand plans for the venue and commenced a complete rebuild of the venue a few years back. Then, with work already underway and the circuit dug up, planning permission fell through and the track was left unfinished. To my knowledge, it has not been used for any form of racing since.

Donington is one of Britain's great national circuits - along with Brands Hatch and my own personal favourite, Oulton Park. It is not, though, a circuit suited to modern F1 and plans to upgrade it do not seem to be built on firm foundations. Sadly, I can't help but feel that plans to move to the British GP to Donington are little more than a stalking horse for plans to move the race out of Britain altogether, and that there is a real danger that not only could Britain lose its Grand Prix, but that if the Donington management team are not careful, we could lose one of the country's great race circuits too. I only hope I'm wrong.

Wheels within wheels

A while back, I had it in my head to try to write a 'Dick Francis on wheels'-style thriller about organised crime and skulduggery, set in the F1 world. It never came to much, and, revolving as it did around a gang of criminals who took over a race team with the intention of using it as a cover for international drug smuggling (whilst furthering the racing career of the Crime Lord's promising son) , I've since discovered that reality beat me to it anyway. Recent events, though, have left me wondering if fundamentally, I suffered a failure of imagination and I should really have been thinking bigger.

When the Max Mosley 'sex scandal' broke a couple of months ago, I have to admit I couldn't summon up much interest in the matter. Under Max Mosley's leadership, the FIA had recently taken legal action against News Corporation over an article Martin Brundle had penned for the Sunday Times in which he had suggested that the FIA had been less than even-handed in its treatment of Mclaren and Ferrari during last year's spy-affair. My first reaction was to assume that, since the story broke in the Sunday Times more downmarket sister publication, the News of the World, this was just News Corporation's way of reminding the FIA Head of the dangers of messing with Rupert Murdoch. A fight between Mosley and Murdoch. Nothing to lose sleep over.

The question of whether Mosley should resign as a consequence of the revelations about his private life was, equally, not one I could bring myself to get worked up about. I have been of the opinion, for some time now, that Mosley has been at the helm of the FIA for too long, and that it is time for someone with fresh ideas to take over. Other, to my mind, far more damaging recent revelations about Mosley's time as FIA President constitute a far better argument for his resignation if they are true, not least because they relate directly to what he has done in that role. However, since stories about clandestine meetings with QCs and fuel filters don't sell newspapers, they have attracted far less publicity than salacious tittle-tattle about 'Nazi' orgies.

I can't really see why the fact that he has paid for sado-masochistic sexual services in a Chelsea flat is relevant, though. In the UK, neither the buying nor the selling of sexual services is, in itself, illegal at present and there is no suggestion that Mosley committed any crime. Comparisons have been made with disgraced former Governor of New York, Elliot Spitzer, who did resign following revelations of his involvement in a prostitution ring. With all due respect, however, there are significant differences between the two cases. For one thing, Spitzer was an elected politician, and as such, his views on, and involvement in prostitution could legitimately be said to be directly connected with his job. Furthermore, Spitzer had actively campaigned to increase criminal penalties in his home state of New York for men who buy sex. Max Mosley, by contrast, is not the head of one of the world's most important cities, but the head of a motoring organisation. One might, quite reasonably, view the buying of sex as immoral, but in Chelsea, it is not illegal and I'm not sure how paying for sex disqualifies a man from involvement in F1. All else aside, on the basis of conversations I had with an old schoolfriend who worked for a while as a journalist in F1, such a policy would considerably thin out the Grand Prix paddock.

There were, of course, the suggestions that there was an explicitly 'Nazi' theme to what went on in the Chelsea flat. I'm not in a position to know one way or another - I'm afraid that there are some things I won't do in the name of research, and watching Max Mosley sex videos is one of them. Nonetheless, I can't help thinking that this owes more to journalistic hyperbole than anything else. Yes, there was undoubtedly a sado-masochistic element to whatever it was that Mosley was up to, but beyond the fact that the Nazis stole much of their 'aesthetic' from the sado-masochistic scene (yes, it really did happen that way round...) I'm not sure what the claims of a 'Nazi' theme are based on. Chances are, they were thrown into the mix because of Mosley's family history. Max's father was, of course, the odious former leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley. Nonetheless, it seems ironic that Mosley has ended up in trouble over this when former FIA President Jean-Marie Balestre's role as a Waffen SS officer during World War II went largely unremarked.

All this, though, is old news, because it now appears that something bigger is at stake. To be fair, while I was initially convinced this was all nothing more than a private feud between News Corporation and Mosley, others, most notably Mike Lawrence, were more astute. Truth be told, Mosley's legal action against the Sunday Times is no more than a minor irritant to the media behemoth, and it is unlikely that they would have felt the need to spend time and money investigating the private life of Mosley - a man whom, after all, your average News of the World reader probably really couldn't care less about one way or the other (let's face it, the only guy in F1 grid that the average UK tabloid reader is likely to have heard of is Lewis Hamilton.) All of which suggests that whoever was behind the operation to expose Mosley's private life, it probably wasn't the News of the World.

A couple of developments over the last week give hint as to what may lie behind it all. First, there was the news that one of the women paid by Mosley is married to a senior MI5 officer. Then came a letter from Mosley, addressed to the presidents of the national clubs, which appeared to suggest he was the victim of a conspiracy to wrest control of F1 from the FIA. All this suggests that someone with rather more directly at stake than News Corporation was behind the 'outing' of Mosley. The News of the World might have been more than happy to run the story, and in the beginning, when I had assumed the story had simply been sold by one of the women involved, perhaps because she was short of cash and had kids to feed and clothe , that seemed explanation enough. I doubt, however, that they hold sufficient grudge against the FIA president to pay for an expensive and complicated spying operation against the man.

Whatever Joe Saward's alter ego, the Mole, might have you believe, I rather doubt that MI5 are much interested in who runs the FIA. In fact, though it wasn't something which the Intelligence Service were keen to admit to publicly, one rather suspects that it was not so much the fact that their agent's wife was involved in prostitution but the possibility that the agent himself might have been doing some private surveillance work on the side which led to his dismissal. After all, the prostitutes' spy cameras does look like the work of people with espionage experience. It is clearly someone went to considerable lengths to dig the dirt on Mosley, and Mosley himself believes their ultimate objective was to undermine the FIA itself.

So who might? Some initially suggested that someone at Mclaren might be behind it all, but in all honesty that seems unlikely. One doubts that a change of leadership at the FIA would result in the rescinding of their $100m fine and such a conspiracy simply seems to dangerous a thing for Mclaren or Mercedes to become involved in. What would the FIA's attitude towards the Woking squad be if that were to come to light? (That said, it should be noted that Peter White has written some interesting pieces suggesting that Mclaren really might be behind it all).


No. I'm inclined to think that whoever was behind the exposure of Mosley had rather more at stake. I'm reminded of an article which the ever-readable Mark Hughes wrote for Autosport a few months back about a dystopian vision of the future of F1, in which the sport had moved away from its European heartland to showpiece tracks built by third-world dictators, been abandoned by the major manufacturers, and the teams were no more than subsidiaries of the sporting rights holder. The racing itself might have been close, but, in Hughes' nightmarish imagined future, it was fixed in advance by the organisers and drivers who stepped out of line quickly found themselves out of work. It was, in short, a horrible cross between NASCAR and television wrestling.

At the end of the article, Hughes suggested that this scenario had come to pass because the sporting rights holders had, faced with vast unpayable debts to the banks who had lent them the money to buy the series in the first place, made all their decisions with the aim of maximising short-term profits at the expense of the long-term health of the sport. So if various Middle Eastern countries would pay more for a race than classic venues like Monza or Spa, that is where they went. If more money could be made out of the sport if so much wasn't being (in the eyes of the sport's rights holders) 'wasted' on car development, then chase out the manufacturer teams and bring in spec-cars. If the best drivers kept winning regardless, then make quite clear to them that it might be disadvantageous to their career if they were to win too often.

The relevance of Hughes little story to the current furore over Max Mosley is, of course, that the sport really is owned by a large private equity firm, CVC Capital Partners, which has borrowed vast sums in order to purchase the rights to F1 (from Bernie Ecclestone...) and now has to find a way of paying back those debts. F1 undoubtedly generates a lot of money, and a lot of that money is retained by the commercial rights holder of the sport. It was this which led to plans for a breakaway 'manufacturer backed' F1 series a few years back. This in turn led to a deal with the major teams which saw them take a larger share of the sport's revenues, though Formula One Management (and hence parent company CVC) still keep around half of all the income.

Doubtless, FOM would really rather keep still more of the money, but so long as F1 remains an expensive development race between the teams, any move to cut the share of the sport's revenues which goes to the teams would be fiercely resisted and might lead to renewed threats of a breakaway series. Of course, one way round this would be top amend the rules so as to reduce costs for the teams - and hence to some extent at least - their clamour for a greater share of the sport's revenues.

The problem for the rights holder, though, is that they don't have control over the rulebook. Since the end of the FISA/FOCA war of the early 1980s, the sport has been governed by the FIA, while the commercial rights have passed from the old Formula One Constructors Association, through Bernie Ecclestone's Formula One Management, and are now in the hands of private equity firm CVC. In short, the rights holders have, at least in theory, no room to change the rules of the sport so as to increase their return on investment. Something which, all else aside, doubtless makes the sport much harder to sell as a going concern.

Into this, then, are three or four very powerful vested interests who doubtless have a vested interest in the future of the FIA. Firstly, there are the teams themselves. If they feel that Max Mosley wants to take the sport in a different direction from where they themselves want to go, might it suit them (either individually or collectively) to have rid of him? Then there are the sport's commercial rights holders. As I've outlined above, there are plenty of hypothetical reasons why they would wish to exert control over those who write the F1 rulebook. Finally, there is Max's old ally in the FISA/FOCA wars, Bernie Ecclestone himself. Technically, these days, he's an employee of FOM, but there can be little doubt that he remains a powerful figure within F1 in his own right. It is probably a mistake to see him solely as the agent of the sport's owners. What, after all, if he felt like buying back the rights to F1 from them, and perhaps at a rather lesser sum than he sold them for? What would be better than a scandal around the sport's governing body to destabilise the sport and hence, quite possibly, persuade CVC that they would really be better cutting their losses now and concentrating on other ventures?

All of the above is no more than speculation. I don't pretend to know what has ultimately motivated those behind the exposing of Max Mosley's private life. I don't know what their agenda is. I don't know whether the sport's best interests would be served by siding with Mosley, or with those who would have him brought down. What I do know is that it is vital that those charged with deciding on next week's vote of confidence on Mosley, and with any decision on his likely successor, should be privy to all the facts before casting their votes. For anyone who really cares about the sport, it is clear that much more is at stake than one's moral position on Max Mosley's private activities.

Bernie Ecclestone, Silverstone and Third World Follies

Some of you may be aware that Joe Saward and Dave Tremayne have, together with photographer Paul-Henri Cahier, launched a new online Grand Prix magazine, Grand Prix Plus. The first two issues are free, and I've always enjoyed Saward's writing on motorsport, first as Autosport's F1 qualifying writer in the late 80s and early 1990s, and later on his own site, Grand Prix so this is good news, in my book.

Nonetheless, I must take issue with his very first editorial. Under the headline, Spain Gets it Right, Britain gets it Wrong, Saward congratulates the Municipal Government in Valencia for putting up the funding for a second Spanish Grand Prix around the city streets, and criticises the British Government for refusing to contribute towards the reputed £100m cost of 'revamping' Silverstone.

I have to say that Saward's argument, that £100m represents better value for money than the £10bn cost of the London Olympics, is a particularly weak one (albeit other bloggers have taken a different view). Now I have to confess that the Olympics interest me little, save their value to what Jane Austen described as "connoisseurs of human folly". In years to come, I suspect that "better value than the Olympics" will come to be a Treasury equivalent of the phrases "shorter than War and Peace" and "funnier than Psycho". To justify spending £100m on a sporting venue which, lets be honest with ourselves here, attracts only a tiny fraction of the interest generated by major events at Wembley Stadium, is going to be rather tricky. Saying that it beats spending £10bn on a Festival of Minor Sports is a start, but hardly constitutes a sufficient argument in itself. And that's before we get into the small matter of the 'Cash for Ash' scandal and, perhaps more pertinently, the fact that F1 has still been unable to entirely rid itself of cigarette sponsorship (thanks, Ferrari) after all the promises previously made. Suffice to say, the current Labour administration are unlikely to do anything that their opponents could portray as a favour to Bernie Ecclestone.

There are a couple more very pertinent questions which the Government would have to ask before putting up any share of the £100m supposedly needed to regenerate Silverstone. The first question is, quite simply, what do they actually need the money for?. There is no suggestion that the circuit itself isn't up to scratch. No, apparently, the "pit complex" is what needs work. This strikes me as rather odd, because, in all honesty, beyond garage space, mains electricity, running water and somewhere to put the press corps (all of which Silverstone had last time I managed to get into the paddock for a look around, back before paranoia and swipe cards took over in the early 1990s) I'm not quite sure what it is that is needed. What I think Bernie Ecclestone means, when he says that the pit complex and paddock needs £100m work, is that this would be what is needed to match the facilities in some other parts of the world But all the facilities in the world won't change the sporting spectacle, nor will they add to the experience for the vast majority of fans, who aren't allowed anywhere near the paddock, lest they lower the tone.

The second question the Government would surely ask is why the owners of Silverstone can't pay for the work themselves. After all, the British Grand Prix is an event which draws crowds in excess of 100,000, and as anyone who has been to the race knows, the tickets are not exactly cheap. The problem is that, the vast majority of the gate receipts go straight to Bernie Ecclestone's FOM organisation in the form of fees for getting to host the race. On top of that, the race promoters are unable to make any money from corporate hospitality, trackside advertising or TV rights, as all these belong to FOM. The simple truth is that the race fees are set at a level that just about allows the organisers to turn a profit, but in no way would enable the financing of the kind of major capital project now being demanded. Not without government money, anyway.

So why is Silverstone in this indivious position in the first place? The short answer is that around the world, Valencia's regional government are not alone. There are plenty of Governments willing to put up large amounts of money to host a Grand Prix. Shanghai is a very impressive 'facility', but the circuit is rather less inspiring, and several of those responsible for its construction are now facing criminal investigations for misuse of public funds. Bahrain has very striking pit garages but is also one of the most mickey-mouse tracks F1 has ever had the misfortune to visit.

Herman Tilke's efforts at Turkey and Malaysia are rather more impressive but still, the question remains - why are these circuits being built in places with no history of, or interest in, motor racing? Formula 1 fans are mostly to be found in Western Europe (and Japan and Latin America, it must be said), and attempts to expand into other areas of the world have largely failed. This is tacitly admitted, with talk that the forthcoming Singapore Grand Prix will take place at night, to allow for live prime-time broadcast in the sport's core market.

So why (Valencia aside) are Bernie and the powers that be seeking to move the racing out of Europe. To my mind, the biggest clue is to be found in the kind of places that F1 is going to. Countries with weak or non-existent democratic accountability. Countries, in short, which can spend large sums of public money on vainglorious follies, £200m ersatz pits complexes et al, safe in the knowledge that they will never have to account for their decisions to their own populaces. Places like China, Bahrain, Malaysia, all of whom ought to have rather more pressing spending priorities than helping to enrich Bernie Ecclestone.

Recently, I found myself in an online debate as to whether Bernie Ecclestone's influence on the sport had been positive or negative. I chose, in the spirit of contrarianism, to answer that he hadn't made nearly as much difference, one way or the other, as he is usually credited as having done. Sure, he helped to turn Grand Prix racing into a global sport, and he certainly helped to turn it into a television sport. But does anyone really think that, if he hadn't existed, some other entrepreneur wouldn't have done the same thing, sooner or later? What he did was merely what promoters in major professional sports did pretty much everywhere. Got the sport on the telly, then set about ruthlessly milking the TV rights and exerting ever more control over the sport's promotion.

Lately, though, I've begun to wonder whether Bernie's influence has become wholly negative. The drive to go literally wherever the money is runs the risk of alienating the sport's core audience without succeeding in bringing in a new one to replace or augment it. Look at Spa - dropped from the calendar last year, and then look at Malaysia. Ask which of these two events attracted the spectators? Short term greed is in danger of eating away at the foundations of the sport. The danger of leaving things in the hands of the very old is that they don['t necessarily have any interest in thinking long term.

I hope the British Grand Prix survives. Silverstone may not quite be Spa Francorchamps, but it is still one of the finest race circuits on the Grand Prix calendar. Of the 11 teams on the Grand Prix grid, 7 are based in Britain, including the supposedly French Renault, and the supposedly Japanese Honda and Super Aguri. Of the 22 drivers, 4 are British, and 2 of those are Grand Prix winners - and we can I'm sure be confident that it is only a matter of time before Lewis Hamilton joins them. If, though, we lose the British Grand Prix, it will not be the fault of the British Government, nor, on balance, of the BRDC. No, the blame lies firmly with the greed and short-sightedness of Bernie Ecclestone and FOM.

Post script - Though the connection to this week's article is tenuous (he is the President of the BRDC, but that's about it) I really ought to draw your attention to an excellent interview with 1996 World Champion Damon Hill in the Times. Regular readers may know that I never regarded him as a truly first rate driver, but he does strike me as one of the most decent, human guys ever to have become World Champion.