Max Mosley now has unfettered control of Formula One as president of the FIA. Up to 31st December 2007 Formula One was a democracy – not any more.

The guile of President Mosley

The governance of Formula One has been under scrutiny since last summer when the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile imposed a world record sporting fine of US$100 million on the McLaren Mercedes team and excluded it from the world championship. It made the sport focus on the immense power that has been vested in one man and his ability to virtually do what he likes. But how did Max Mosley achieve it and persuade people to hand him so much power asks Tom Rubython in a major profile of the president.

Until 2003, Max Mosley had a relatively uneventful reign as president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the governing body of world motorsport and particularly Formula One.

During his first 12 years in power there had been controversies, but nothing of any real consequence.

But in 2002 he started to change and not, in most people’s opinion, for the better. In that year, two new men came into his life. The first was 43-year-old Richard Woods, who was promoted from a minor role at the FIA Foundation to be the FIA’s director of communications. From the moment of his appointment, Woods was never again far from Mosley’s side. Later that year, Mosley met a man who would become his svengali. Fifty-year-old Tony Purnell came into Formula One at the end of 2002 when he replaced Niki Lauda as team principal of Jaguar Racing.

Purnell was remarkably unsuccessful in his brief tenure at a Formula One team but he caught the eye of Max Mosley. Mosley liked him a lot and Purnell had plenty of ideas about the future of Formula One which Mosley readily took on board.

The relationship of Woods and Purnell with Mosley has marked the last five years of his presidency. Both men have a deep admiration for the president. That the admiration is mutual is not in doubt. They formed a troika and two years ago a person close to all three described the relationship as “homoerotic”. Whatever it was it changed Mosley thereafter.

The following year Mosley began a raft of changes that many think have ruined the sport. They were all Purnell’s ideas, which Mosley gratefully embarked on. He started by radically changing the Saturday qualifying sessions. After that the changes came thick and fast in a bewildering series of rule changes, none of which added anything to the sport. Unsurprisingly the television ratings for Saturday afternoon qualifying dropped alarmingly. For a farcical few months, qualifying was even extended to Sunday morning. It was a ludicrous situation, and soon dropped, but the damage was done. One other ludicrous idea persisted – a 15-minute fuel burn-off procession at the peak TV time in qualifying. Despite the madness, the relationship between Mosley and Purnell drew closer and closer and the two men even went on a walking holiday together in Vietnam.

In  2004 Purnell persuaded Mosley to make a change in the Formula One engine regulations from V10 3-litre engines to V8 2.4-litre engines. It was a move opposed by everyone. The motor manufacturers, led by BMW’s Mario Theissen, flatly refused to go along with it. But with the help of Richard Woods, Mosley threatened BMW that he would interfere with the crash test ratings of its new BMW 5-series model.  The NCap crash test programme was run by an FIA affiliate. The BMW 5-series had had an unfortunate test and not gained the required four stars due to a technicality. The car was due to be re-tested. Mosley told Theissen that unless he backed his engine proposals the BMW would only get three stars. That would have cost the German car company billions of dollars in lost sales. Theissen was forced to go along with it and opposition to the new V8 engine evaporated. The unspoken of incident showed just how ruthless the pairing of Mosley and Woods could be. One insider said: “It became evident then that nothing was too grubby for them.”

Paul Stoddart is one who believes Mosley was a changed man after he came under the influence of Woods and Purnell. He says: “He changed to become a dictator of the way he saw the future and was no longer prepared to listen to any reason proposed by the teams and any due process.” Stoddart believes he particularly changed after he moved to Monte Carlo, as he says: “His mother had died and other things had happened in his life and we got the mad Max we have today.”

Stoddart is in a good position to judge, as before 2004 he was a fanatical supporter of Mosley. He adds: “During 2004 someone or something definitely changed him.”

In 2004 there was certainly one great change in Mosley’s life when he finally became independently wealthy. It is believed he received a gratis payment from Bernie Ecclestone of US$300 million as a token of his appreciation. The influx of money signalled a move to the tax haven of Monaco. In England he would have paid 40 per cent tax on the windfall; in Monaco nothing. So in March 2004 Mosley made the decision to relocate there from London. But instead of coming clean and saying he was leaving England for tax reasons, he concocted the most amazing (and untrue) story: he claimed to have been advised that a fatal accident in a race event under FIA jurisdiction within the European Union could result in his arrest. It followed the introduction of a new European arrest warrant. Mosley said: “I have been advised that it would be prudent to relocate outside EU jurisdiction.” It was the most amazing nonsense, swallowed by just about everyone. Of course it would have been embarrassing should Ecclestone’s payment to him have become public.

He may have been ensconced happily in Monte Carlo a rich man, but 2004 was to prove his most torrid year ever, which even led to his resignation for a brief month before he realised what he had done and retracted it. The 21 days between his resignation and comeback were pure farce. The resignation came after Mosley lost a vote of the FIA World Motorsport Council (WMSC). It was the first time in 13 years that he had lost a vote.

The WMSC is the most powerful committee in the sport and effectively rules Formula One. It has around 22 members from FIA affiliated motorsport clubs around the world. It was ironic that the losing vote was over a relatively minor matter regarding legislation for go-kart racing. But Mosley could not tolerate losing and made his displeasure known. He spent the 21 days of his resignation undermining the WMSC members and carrying out a series of executive executions in a night of the long knives. When he returned the opposition had been squashed, never to recover. The two ringleaders of the revolt, French stalwarts Jacques Regis and Yvon Leon, were then quietly disposed of over the following two years.

Rather than subduing Mosley, his return emboldened him and he hatched a scheme with Woods and Purnell to completely take over Formula One. His opportunity was expiry of the Concorde Agreement at the end of 2007.

Control of Formula One was effectively held by the 10 or 11 team principals, who met monthly, and a mixed committee called the Formula One Commission, which met quarterly. Mosley made a bold move to take absolute control of Formula One by changing the terms of a new contract that was to run from 2008 to 2012. Amazingly, he was allowed to get away with it.

No one can deny Mosley’s scheme was ingenious. First he decided to open the entries for the 2008 world championship early, in March 2006, two years before the season started and even months before entries for the 2007 season had to be lodged. But he stated that any teams that entered would enter under his new rules. He also said that the window of time to enter would be only eight days. Teams had to choose between not entering or accepting the new regulations. There was no middle ground.

It was known that Mosley had Ferrari in his pocket. The team principals all believed that if they didn’t enter, Mosley would craft a new championship around Ferrari. They felt helpless. And there was another complication. The teams all had lengthy sponsorship contracts that depended on their entries into the FIA World Championship. Without a guaranteed entry in 2008 the contracts could suddenly have been worthless and been cancelled.

As part of the process, Mosley also announced he would only validate a maximum of 12 teams. This caused a frenzy of 13 potential new teams vying for the theoretical one extra entry slot available.

It was a time for the teams, especially those that were part of the GPWC/GPMA consortium, to stand and be counted and refuse to endorse these new structures. But either they didn’t recognise it, or didn’t focus, and all the teams had entered by the deadline. They appeared frightened that the new 13 new entrants would take their slots.

Mosley’s new regulations gave him, via the FIA World Motorsport Council, unfettered power to do anything he liked. The team principals no longer had a veto and the Formula One Commission was neutered completely. It became so irrelevant it has not convened since.

The new regulations saw the formation of two new committees, a technical working group and sporting working group, with a new-style F1 Commission over both.  Decisions were to be by majority vote and the Commission was stacked in favour of Mosley. In spite of that, the WMSC retained the right to veto any decisions made by the Commission. In other words, Mosley had complete control of Formula One. It was an extraordinary performance.

So how had he achieved this outcome, which made him the sport’s sole dictator?

His early life and background has a lot to do with it. Mosley is a beguiling mix of mystery and Machiavellian characteristics created by circumstance and chance.

He was born into immense privilege and seemingly unlimited wealth. But that’s where his advantage in life ended. Few people could have been born with more controversial parents than politician Sir Oswald Mosley and socialite, Diana Mitford.

Sir Oswald was head of the British Fascist Party and a Mussolini sympathiser and Mitford was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler and a Nazi sympathiser. Unsurprisingly both were interned by the British government at the outbreak of World War II. So, through no fault of his own, the first three years of Max Mosley’s life were spent in Holloway prison.

When the war was over his parents were advised for their own safety to leave England and he spent much of his childhood in Ireland, before being schooled in France and Germany. Only in 1958 could the family resume a normal life and Mosley went up to Oxford and in 1961 graduated with a degree in physics. After university, in 1964 he qualified as a barrister. Soon afterwards he caught the racing bug after attending a meeting at Silverstone. He had enough money to buy a car and race himself, with moderate success, being good enough to get as far as Formula Two, no mean achievement. But he barely won anything and became a team entrant by helping set up the new March Ford team in 1970 with four more experienced partners. It wasn’t a particular success and he finally split with March in 1977 and became the legal adviser to the Formula One Constructors’ Association (FOCA) and a member of the FISA F1 Commission. Fifteen years later he was president of the FIA.

His personal character is inextricably mixed up with his business persona and has never been properly analysed. On a first meeting, he is immensely charming, highly personable and particularly likeable. But it is skin deep and that first perception is miles away from reality. People who have dealt with him say his word is not always his bond. They say it is easy to be beguiled by his opening manner. One said: “He presents himself as the ‘voice of reason’.”

He is not entirely comfortable in the world of Formula One; his obvious abrasive and difficult relationship with Ron Dennis, a former mechanic and a man born the wrong side of the tracks, is the perfect example. To a smaller extent that also applies to Bernie Ecclestone.

Someone who once worked closely with Mosley in the early 1990s says that to understand him properly you have to realise that on some subconscious level he feels he is “slumming”. He says that Mosley feels that people of his ‘pedigree’ don’t seek elected office. Rather they pursue gentlemanly or entrepreneurial pursuits where they can amass prestige, power of the right kind and great wealth. That is surprising in view of the fact that his father was a British member of parliament and he himself sought a parliamentary seat.

But people close to him swear that Mosley considers being president of the FIA a “grubby” job and he persuaded others such as Marco Piccinini to “slum” with him to make the job more bearable.

Having said that, he undoubtedly likes to be at the centre of the action. And this desire to participate but not fully participate has produced a dichotomy.

“He leads his whole life in an immoral way” says that same person who worked with him. “In his relationships with people, he is fundamentally dishonest.” One former team principal who had many run-ins with Mosley in the 1980s is a lot stronger and says: “He lies with greater conviction that he tells the truth, that’s why he is so good at what he does. His long focus on achieving set objectives is extraordinary when he wants it to be.” Another says: “He demands to be at the centre of the action and it sometimes seems that if there is no action he somehow creates it. No one, no one is better than he at this.”

Some say Mosley’s private life has changed dramatically in the past five years. While his personal life is a source of mystery, it is frequently alluded to in the media, if not directly discussed. At the turn of the year, the journalist Richard Williams in a major interview in the Guardian newspaper, called him “curiously boyish”. What Williams meant is anyone’s guess but he is arguably the most experienced sports journalist working for Britain’s national press who writes regularly about Formula One and his words always have resonance.

As far as Mosley is concerned, his private life is no one else’s business. If he chooses to live on his own in an apartment in Monaco, he believes it his affair and no one else’s. But for sure the situation with his wife prompts gossip. No one inside Formula One has ever met Jean Mosley and she has never been photographed in the 37 years her husband has been involved in the sport. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, she has never attended a race or social occasion with her husband. She was apparently present when Mosley was awarded the Legion d’Honneur by the French government, but studiously avoided being photographed. She is said to live alone in France, as her husband lives alone in Monaco.

Max and Jean Mosley have two sons who have also never been photographed and have only ever been known to attend a few races in the 1980s. One is thought to live in France and the other dabbles in the internet from a mews house in west London.

Patrick and Alexander Mosley take great offence whenever the nature of the relationship of their mother and father is mentioned in the media. Officially Mosley is a happily married man, even if few actually believe it.

But Mosley’s chameleon-like ability has never been doubted, and the ability to lie with the same conviction as he tells the truth has served him well. No more so than in the amazing events that happened between 2003 and 2006, which have gone into history known as “the Mosley flip-flop”. It started when he made statements saying Formula One would be better off without the car manufacturers.

On 7th February 2003, Mosley wrote a letter to the Formula One teams setting out some new proposals for changes to the technical regulations. Mosley wrote: “The way to guarantee the long-term health and stability of the championship is to make sure there is a solid group of independent teams which do not depend on the presence of manufacturers for their survival. We can rely on the independent teams. We cannot rely on the manufacturers.

“Although their presence is very welcome, the car manufacturers will come and go as it suits them – they always have done and they always will. After all, they are responsible to their shareholders, not to motorsport.” In another letter to Ron Dennis and Sir Frank Williams, Mosley wrote: “The manufacturers contribute a lot and we must continue to do all we can to encourage them to stay. But we must never be so naïve as to believe we can rely on them. Never forget that the top executive is an employee. He could be out of a job next week. His replacement might hate motorsport. It would be folly to allow Formula One to be at the mercy of personnel and policy changes in the major manufacturers.” It was a clear and unmistakable message. Few agreed with it but equally few could argue with the logic of it. Then came the extraordinary ‘flip-flop’. In November 2006, Mosley and BMW director, Dr. Burkhard Göschel, chairman of the Grand Prix Manufacturers Association, held a briefing for a small group of journalists during which the pair claimed that the long battle between the FIA and the manufacturers over the future of Formula One was over. But for Mosley it proved to be an embarrassing u-turn in his attitude towards the manufacturers. His position now was that Formula One was totally reliant on the manufacturers. He said: “We are completely dependent on the manufacturers because they know what will come in four, five or six years time. So it is a case of sitting down with them and discussing which of these developments we can use in F1.”

How could an intelligent man form such a wildly different opinion about something so important in so short a time? Many people believe that in 2003 and 2006 it was not Mosley speaking but Ecclestone. In 2003 Ecclestone had reason to wage war on the manufacturers and want them out of Formula One. By 2006 he had reason to make up and embrace them; Mosley was merely a convenient platform for his views.

And there lies the crux of Max Mosley’s life – his relationship with Formula One’s commercial supremo, Bernie Ecclestone.

So what is this relationship between Mosley and Ecclestone about? A relationship so strong that the younger man will dance to almost any tune the older man plays. It goes back a long way.

Mosley and Ecclestone met in 1970 when Mosley was a team entrant feeling his way as an out-of-his-depth 27 year old. But the 38-year-old Ecclestone was a different proposition, a very self-assured driver manager who had already been round the block a few times. Mosley had trained as a barrister and thought he knew what he was doing, but in reality he hadn’t a clue. Conversely, Ecclestone knew exactly what he was doing and had realised that there was a large amount of money sloshing around in Formula One that demanded his attention.

Truth was he admired Mosley’s chutzpah and the two became friends even though Ecclestone was privately appalled by Mosley’s lack of judgement about people. He knew he probably wouldn’t make it alone. He was right, and when Mosley’s days as a team principal came to an unsuccessful end, Ecclestone took him under his wing as his sidekick. He was to prove incredibly useful in that role for the next 30 years. Within a few years of them meeting, Ecclestone was a powerful team owner himself and winning races. But crucially he had taken over the role of representing the teams as the commercial head of FOCA. He got 20 per cent commission on all revenues the teams received. Mosley effectively ran FOCA day to day. By the end of the 1980s, Mosley had also ingratiated himself with what is now the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, motorsport’s governing body. He was appointed as president of its Manufacturers’ Commission in 1987. Ecclestone also finagled incumbent FIA president Jean-Marie Balestre into giving him a part-time job as the FIA’s vice president of promotional affairs. It was wholly improper as Ecclestone was FOCA’s chief negotiator on the other side of the table from the FIA. Now he was in both camps.

For Mosley and Ecclestone it was all part of a grand plan to get him elected as president of the FIA. It was an audacious plan. One observer of the period described it as “akin to a borrower getting his best friend appointed as manager of the bank he had borrowed from”.

Mosley made getting elected a “crusade of right”. He believed that Balestre, because of his dual presidency of the Fédération Française de Sport Automobile (FFSA), the French governing body, guilty of an “overwhelming conflict of interest”. He told voters that “the president should have no other job in motorsport”.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the crunch came. Reportedly, two months before the elections were held, Mosley and Ecclestone had secured the support of 49 of the 72 member countries that could vote. Interestingly, Balestre thought he would win 68-4, so confident was he.

But he had badly miscalculated. The bad tempered Balestre was not popular and was in ill-health having suffered a heart attack in 1986.  In the 1991 elections, where Ecclestone played a full part, Mosley beat Balestre who quickly retired totally from any positions of power. Ecclestone bluntly told FIA voting countries that held a Grand Prix, such as Brazil, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Australia and Japan, they would lose their races unless Mosley got their vote. He also told other people that Mosley “didn’t have much of a chance” to disguise the fact that he was in the lead and likely to win.

Undoubtedly Ecclestone played a double game and had also convinced Balestre he was supporting his election whilst secretly campaigning for Mosley. It was a sleight of hand Ecclestone and Mosley were to repeat many times in the following 16 years.

At the time, no one was unhappy the see the 70-year-old despot Balestre toppled.

Mosley later told the writer Terry Lovell: “I think Bernie would have been quite happy with Balestre or me. He was on good terms with both. However, as he doesn’t speak French and Balestre speaks little English, he probably finds it easier to communicate with me.”

So perhaps it was inevitable that on 9th October 1991 in Paris, Mosley was elected the ninth president of the FIA’s sporting division by 43 votes to 29, six votes fewer than he had originally forecast. When Balestre held a press conference that day and announced his defeat, he appeared terribly upset and betrayed by the result.

Rumour has it that Ecclestone had acted as unofficial campaign manager for Balestre and it was he who misleadingly concealed the true voting intentions of the delegates. Reportedly Ecclestone had assured Balestre the opposite. The story, told many times, is probably true and no one who knows Ecclestone would have put it past him.

Having Mosley elected as president of the FIA was the key moment of Ecclestone’s career. And Mosley’s. It was like handing Ecclestone the key to Formula One’s riches. And so it proved over the next 16 years.

Cleverly Mosley’s first official act after being elected was to hand in his resignation, dated a year later with a pledge to seek re-election on the record of his first year in power. He kept his hands clean and the following year he was re-elected with ease.

But Mosley’s election made no sense in financial terms. He pledged to give up all his lucrative outside interests with Ecclestone, his personal consultancies and his share in Nick Wirth’s Simtek Grand Prix team. But his FIA job was unpaid. So how was Mosley to subsist? That is a question that has never satisfactorily been answered.

Certainly Ecclestone started making hay straight away. Around this period something funny happened to the TV revenues agreement. Balestre and or Mosley had negotiated with Ecclestone for the FIA to receive 30 per cent of all TV revenues that FOCA collected. Ecclestone would keep 20 per cent and the teams get 50 per cent. Before the formal agreement the teams had picked up around US$14 million between them, Ecclestone US$4 million and Balestre on behalf of the FIA had received only US$1 million. Balestre of course had no idea what he should receive, as Ecclestone never told him.

 The commercial agreement under which Formula One is run is called the Concorde Agreement. Its next phase was to run from 1992 to 1997. As coverage of Formula One continued to grow in popularity during the 1980s, its television rights had become increasingly important to a governing body whose principal source of income had previously come from homologation.

In 1990, according to Mosley, Balestre negotiated for the FIA to enjoy a 30 per cent share of the TV rights for 1992 to 1997, worth about US$6 million or more a year.

But according to Mosley, Balestre, fearing for the future, did something very peculiar. He signed a side deal with a company called Allsopp, Parker & Marsh Ltd (APM), which sold trackside advertising. APM was in fact two companies, one registered in Ireland, the other in Switzerland. In a Byzantine structure, they were owned by Patrick McNally and Ecclestone. No one knew who owned which bit but it was confused enough for Ecclestone to legitimately deny he owned it – something he did many times over the next 15 years. He certainly owned one of them but no one knew which.

Anyway for reasons that are not clear, Mosley says that in fact Balestre negotiated for the revenues between 1992 and 1997 to be paid to APM and in return the FIA would receive a fixed US$3 million fee. It was scarcely believable but no one was in any position to question it, as the deal was kept secret. That is until it was uncovered by an investigative team from the BBC television programme, Panorama, in 1998.

The Panorama programme exposed the arrangement, which was apparently renewed again by Mosley in 1997, despite the explosion in TV revenues. By all estimates Mosley settled for barely two per cent of what the FIA could have received if it had kept the 30 per cent Balestre originally negotiated. Balestre had been bamboozled but at least had negotiated only a 50 per cent discount in exchange for a guaranteed sum. Mosley sold out for peanuts. And then he proceeded to repeat his mistake for the next agreement, which was done this time directly with Ecclestone’s Formula One Administration Ltd organisation running from 1998 to 2007. All in all, from these three agreements with APM, the FIA lost around US$1.7 billion in revenues that it would have received from its 30 per cent. Ecclestone and McNally made US$200 million over the five years APM had the agreement and the FOA made US$1.5 billion for the 10 years it held it.

The BBC TV Panorama programme had been very critical of the 15-year commercial rights deal Mosley had done with Ecclestone. When it interviewed Mosley for the programme, the FIA president was very surprised by the interviewer, Mark Killick’s  knowledge of the secret agreements. In a famous exchange on television, Killick asked Mosley whether he was “trying to defend the indefensible”. Quick as a flash Mosley told him “quite the reverse, you’re attacking the unattackable”.

After the programme aired, Mosley told Terry Lovell: “I wanted to sue, but Bernie said it wasn’t worth it.” For whatever reasons Mosley didn’t sue. In reality he couldn’t take the chance of all these secret agreements being brought out into the open.

All in all the FIA lost US$1.7 billion from 1992 to 2007. One observer says: “Only a halfwit with no financial knowledge would have signed those three deals. They handed Ecclestone and McNally nearly US$2 billion of the FIA’s cash.”

Mosley was never open and truthful about any of these deals and had it not been for the BBC journalists from Panorama they would never have become publicly known.

Despite all this largesse towards Ecclestone, Mosley was re-elected with ease in the FIA presidency elections of 1997, 2001 and 2005.

His re-election gave him confidence to push the boundaries of proprietary.

Unsurprisingly, in 1998 the European Union began an investigation of Formula One after complaints about abuse of its monopoly, especially Ecclestone’s TV contracts. The then EU competition commissioner, Karel van Miert, called it the worst example of monopoly abuse he had ever seen. And despite the persuasive words of Ecclestone, Van Miert refused to be deflected.

Everyone expected that the European Commission would order the FIA to put the commercial contracts out to tender. But then Van Miert was toppled as competition commissioner and replaced by Mario Monti, who took a different view. He was eventually persuaded to settle by Mosley and Ecclestone. They hashed out a spurious agreement to separate the FIA from the commercial side of Formula One. But the solution was to hand sole control of that to Ecclestone.

This was achieved by an extraordinary agreement Mosley signed with Ecclestone in 2001. If the three previous agreements had been breathtaking in their one-sidedness, then the agreement that would run from 2010 made them seem nothing.

The scheme first saw the light of day in late 1999 when a new agreement was hatched between the two men for a 100-year agreement from 1st January 2010 until 31st December 2110. It was truly stunning in its audacity.

Mosley had by then turned the FIA World Motorsport Council into what one wag famously called “a squad of nodding donkeys”. In fact, the WMSC had never voted against his wishes and had voted unanimously in favour of every Mosley proposal for over 50 consecutive meetings spanning 13 years. But getting the 100-year agree- ment past them would prove difficult, even for Mosley.

Mosley brought every ounce of guile he possessed to bear to get the agreement approved. At the first meeting of the WMSC to consider the new 100-year agreement, Mosley told the members to vote against it and they did. That should have been the end of the matter. But of course Mosley’s recommendation was a sleight of hand. He knew that if there was no debate and no seeming objections, the deal would look very poor from the outside. By advising the WMSC to vote against, it appeared he was also against.

Mosley told writer Terry Lovell, who did much excellent investigative work for a book he wrote called ‘Bernie’s Game’: “They (the WMSC members) believed it would leave Ecclestone free to sideline the FIA as the regulator.” Another source, believed to be long-time Ecclestone associate, Jonathan Ashman, told Lovell: “They didn’t really care whether it was US$300 million or US$500 million. They were terrified that they might lose their stewards’ armbands and all that nonsense.” Ashman was right about one thing – it was certainly all nonsense. Mosley was leading the WMSC by the nose towards his objective, which was getting through the 100-year agreement.

At this stage an intelligent businessman would have asked why the contract wasn’t being put out to tender. It was a question that seemingly the WMSC never appeared to ask.

Mosley dressed all this up as his way of complying with European competition law. One former FIA senior manager says: “He told us that if the FIA disposed of all its commercial interests it would persuade the EU that it was innocent of any non-competitive behaviour.” The FIA’s own lawyers were deeply sceptical, but astonishingly Mosley was able to persuade Mario Monti to give his approval to the 100-year deal. 

Having secured European Commission approval, Mosley then told people he would take no further part in the negotiations with Ecclestone for the 100-year deal. Mosley claimed he did not want to be seen to be compromising the FIA’s negotiating position.

So at the annual FIA General Assembly meeting on 8th October 1999, Mosley replaced himself at the negotiating table with a four-man negotiating team consisting of Rosario Alessi, president of the Automobil Club d’Italia; Michel Boeri, president of the Automobile Club de Monaco; Otto Flimm, president of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club; and John Large, honorary president of the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport. Mosley handpicked them to represent the FIA. Other than Boeri, all were in Mosley’s pocket and two of them had less than stellar reputations. Alessi was facing allegations of financial impropriety in Italy and Large was regarded as a “scoundrel” in his native Australia. Astonishingly the FIA General Assembly was persuaded by Mosley to give the four men “power to close the deal with the full authority of the FIA”.

After seemingly negotiating with Ecclestone, Alessi, Boeri, Flimm and Large agreed the 100-year deal for US$300 million. And it was irrevocable.

Mosley claimed he was stunned by it and criticised the four men for doing a bad deal. But as Lovell revealed: “It was a remarkably naïve deal but one that was made possible by Mosley giving the four men carte blanche to avoid any media criticism of himself.”

Mosley later claimed to Lovell that during the negotiation he had been urging Alessi, Boeri, Flimm and Large to “go for more, go for more”.

But then Ecclestone said he only wanted to pay US$200 million. Mosley claimed later that once the four men had agreed the deal, he was powerless to intervene and increase it. Amazingly everyone fell for the story. As one Formula One observer pointed out: “If Mosley had been genuine he would have put the deal out to tender.” And there lay the rub. Mosley should have put the deal out to open tender to achieve the best price. With only one bidder (Ecclestone) a low price was inevitable.

Estimates of what the deal was really worth ranged from US$3 billion to US$6 billion. With interest he was forgoing by paying in advance. Ecclestone was paying only US$450 million. By comparison, during the same period Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB organisation paid US$1.7 billion for English Premiership football rights for just three years for Britain only. By contrast, Ecclestone had brought global rights to Formula One for 100 years. Outsiders estimate they were really worth perhaps as much as US$9 billion, if paid in instalments over 100 years. Certainly the US$320 million Ecclestone actually paid was as one media executive said: “A joke.”

The 100-year deal caused no immediate impact as it was not due to start for eight years. Few people took any notice. When in June 2000 it went before the World Motorsport Council and was approved at an extraordinary meeting of the FIA’s General Assembly, it was passed unanimously.

And Mosley was not finished. Instead of the US$320 million going into the FIA’s coffers it was funnelled into an organisation separately controlled by him called The FIA Foundation. The FIA itself never saw a cent.

With all these deals under his belt, Ecclestone proceeded to sell his companies for billions. First he sold a quarter of the business for US$350 million to a venture capitalist. Then he floated a US$1.4 billion Eurobond in September 1998 and paid himself the money as a dividend. Then he sold another 50 per cent of the company to interests connected with Leo Kirch for an effective price of US$1.5 billion. All in all he took US$3.25 billion out of Formula One thanks to his deals with Mosley. And this on top of the US$1.7 billion he had earned from the APM deals and the US$1 billion he had received as commission for his companies. By the time 2007 closed, since Mosley had become FIA president in 1991, Ecclestone had extracted nearly US$6 billion in profits from Formula One. One astute observer said: “It is the biggest heist in history.” The same observer reckoned Ecclestone was legitimately entitled to only US$1 billion. He said: “Ecclestone could have been a billionaire without Mosley’s help, but that wasn’t enough.”

As 2007 dawned most people expected Max Mosley to wind down towards an already stated retirement date of November 2009. But then he suddenly announced that he would not be retiring after all and would probably stand again as president for an unprecedented fifth time, meaning if elected he would have served 22 years in office. With that uncertainty out of the way, Mosley plunged straight into fresh controversy and announced a whole new host of controversial technical changes that would, if enacted, radically alter the whole essence of the sport of Formula One.

That aside, Mosley’s summer of 2007 was livened up considerably when he decided to intervene in the McLaren and Ferrari spying affair, which had exploded in June when Ferrari filed a legal complaint against Nigel Stepney, their top race engineer, claiming he had tampered with its cars.

The zeal with which Mosley pursued the case surprised everyone. It is a constant criticism that sometimes Mosley just seems to go looking for trouble and this appears to have been one of those occasions. As Adam Cooper, the well-known Formula One commentator and expert on the affair, said: “In his dogged pursuit of the matter, no stone was left unturned.”

Mosley cannot be criticised for the verdict of the FIA’s eventual decision against McLaren. No right thinking fair-minded person could not believe McLaren and its top executives were guilty of the crimes they were accused of committing. The evidence was overwhelming and McLaren was given the benefit of any doubt there was. For once Mosley played it fair and straight.

But Mosley had no need to interfere because the Modena district attorney in Italy had already launched a criminal investigation. Although it was a colourful story, it was thought to be an isolated incident. But on 3rd July it exploded to include McLaren’s chief designer Mike Coughlan who it was alleged had been receiving stolen Ferrari technical information from Stepney. Ferrari had got lucky when Coughlan’s wife had copied the documents and it was tipped off by the manager of the shop where the copying was done. Ferrari sued Coughlan in London’s high court and Ferrari team principal Jean Todt contacted Max Mosley and asked him to get involved. This was the point Mosley could, and many say should, have stopped to pause. It was actually none of the FIA’s business. There is nothing in the FIA sporting regulations that says teams cannot spy on each other and steal each other’s secrets. It may be a criminal or civil offence, but it was not against the rules in motorsport. And there was a good precedent. When Ferrari had accused its former engineers of taking secrets to Toyota a few years ago, the criminal court in Germany imposed prison sentences on the two main miscreants. The FIA ignored the whole affair. There were plenty of good reasons for it to do the same with the McLaren and Ferrari affair. But for reasons best known to himself, on 12th July Mosley charged McLaren with bringing the sport into disrepute by having unauthorised possession of Ferrari information.

Mosley takes personal affront when he is accused of interfering in something that was none of the FIA’s concern. He says: “Quite clearly we had to do something about it. When you look at what actually happened, I can’t begin to understand why anyone can question what we do, or our motives.”

But once Mosley was involved, even with a cursory examination of the evidence it was clear McLaren was guilty. But under Mosley’s peculiar brand of law, which actually favoured McLaren, it all depended on “how guilty”. The FIA was quite capable of finding teams and people guilty but then imposing no sentence. It was the law as practised by no one else.

And so it came to pass, on 26th July, amid much hoo-ha Mosley and the FIA World Motorsport Council found McLaren guilty but with no sentence. Mosley said: “There was insufficient evidence that they benefited.”

But this proved to be wrong after it emerged McLaren had used the data and documents appeared to irrefutably confirm it. On 13th September, the FIA fined the team US$100 million and threw the team out of the championship. But bizarrely Mosley allowed the drivers to keep their points. The decision created a furore in the media, especially amongst British journalists. McLaren is a very popular team with the British media. It doles out generous hospitality at races in its futuristic motorhome. As a result, Mosley received a lot of personal criticism. But unfortunately for his critics, on this occasion he was right. McLaren was guilty and on 13th December, Mosley was vindicated when McLaren’s chief operating officer Martin Whitmarsh wrote a letter of apology to the FIA admitting it had used illegally held data.

Mosley is adamant the team and its principals were guilty as charged and had openly lied to the WMSC. He explains: “One can only say it’s extremely improbable that Ron (Dennis) didn’t know. Every time I speak to him he still assures me that he would never tell a lie, that he never has told a lie and that he hasn’t lied to us. When you’ve known somebody for 40 years it’s very difficult just to say, ‘Well, I don’t believe you.’ But in the end no hard-nosed lawyer or policeman would believe it for a moment.”

And he doesn’t believe that the publicity the case attracted has done anything to harm Formula one: “The publicity actually increases interest. So I don’t think it does any harm to Formula One as long as the sponsors and so on feel the sport is honestly run and honestly governed.”

One particular aspect of the affair was truly bizarre and does not reflect well on Mosley’s ethics or sense of fair play. After the WMSC effectively found McLaren guilty, but not guilty enough to be punished, Mosley referred the case to the FIA Court of Appeal, an independent body. Then before the Appeal could be heard Mosley cancelled it arbitrarily and decided to conduct a retrial. This was kangaroo justice, as the Appeal Court’s function was to consider new evidence and if necessary dish out a new punishment. But of course the Court of Appeal was outside Mosley’s control.

But any miscarriage of justice McLaren might have felt was easily extinguished by its guilt. Mosley may have behaved badly, but Dennis had behaved even worse.

Fallout from the McLaren affair was huge. Mosley created a dangerous cadre of enemies in British motorsport who felt Dennis had been treated appallingly. In particular former drivers Sir Jackie Stewart, Damon Hill and Martin Brundle criticised him in public for the first time. Stewart made a speech at year-end saying that it was time “to remove any concern over the genuine independence and impartiality” in the FIA’s govern- ance of the sport. Mosley reacted particularly badly. He attacked Stewart as being a “certified halfwit”. He also issued libel proceedings against Brundle in Paris.

When December dawned, 2007 had proved to be the most active year of Mosley’s life. At the age of 67, some 16 years after he was elected as the most powerful administrator in motorsport, Mosley was showing no signs of slowing down. As he now admits, he has lost some motivation at times, but new challenges have come along. Notable among them is his personal quest to encourage Formula One teams to pursue green technologies. He says: “The only thing that keeps me doing it is new ideas and new technologies and steering the thing in a sensible direction. That’s the motivator.”

By common consent this is an admirable pursuit and still gives him the chance to enjoy yet his finest hour. Will he embrace that opportunity or reject it? With Max Mosley one can never be too sure.