07/05/2005
NEWS STORY
Max Mosley: I thought we ought to have a short press conference, this was planned some time ago, and what I wanted to do was briefly, with you, go through the season so far, to talk about the 2008 regulations, to talk about the longer term and then obviously to take any questions, or try to answer any questions that anybody might wish to put.
As far as the season is concerned, a quick word about Australia, because that was a strange incident, where somebody went off to court and got an order. Well, since those proceedings, I've seen the transcript of the proceedings and I have to say they were a complete farce, and the court was grossly misled.
Now, it is interesting, and the transcript is going to be made available after this press conference to anybody who wants to see it, but what is interesting is that the court were told a number of things which were not true and not told a number of things which it should have been told and in those sort of proceedings it's absolutely fundamental that you reveal all the details to the court because the other person isn't there. Not to reveal all the details is actually contempt of court.
Now there is no way in the world that the leading counsel that said these things to the judge would have said them if he didn't believe them to be true, that absolutely wouldn't happen, you could be disbarred for doing something like that, so he was obviously given some extremely misleading instructions.
If you are interested, read the transcript of the proceedings, you'll see it's really almost comical, the sort of things that he was told. So enough said for that, except that as far as we're concerned, it's not a problem, it doesn't set a precedent because the fundamental procedures were not followed, not even remotely followed, so it really isn‘t a problem.
On to the regulations; now there's been a certain amount of controversy about the 2005 and 2006 regulations and in particular the changes that were made. And if you recall, there are three main elements to this. There were the changes to the tyres, changes to the aerodynamics and changes to the engine. There was also a change to qualifying. Now the qualifying is, in my view, a mistake. It was proposed by, with all fairness to him, our commercial rights holder, Bernie Ecclestone, it was his idea, and the idea was that this would be good for the television on Sunday morning, and on that basis it was let through. I think everybody now realises that that's a mistake but occasionally mistakes are made. The difficultly now is to get it changed back, we would need to get all the teams to agree and we all know how difficult that can be.
But leaving qualifying on one side, the three important changes to the tyres, the aerodynamics and the engine, were brought in under Article 7.5 of the Concorde Agreement on grounds of safety. It's been suggested that this was somehow pushed through or forced through or done in some undemocratic way. Well, could I remind you that when that package was put, after several months of waiting for proposals from the technical working group, when that package was actually put, the technical working group discussed it on the 6th of September and they were unanimously in favour of the tyre regulations, that's to say the tyres lasting for the whole race and so on. They were also unanimously in favour of the aerodynamic proposals, the changes to the aerodynamics, and they were in favour by a majority of seven to three of the engine proposals.
So one can hardly call that undemocratic. The only reason that that package didn't go through the technical working group as a package was that we needed eight votes out of ten, and although we had ten out of ten on the tyres and ten out of ten on the aerodynamics, we only had seven out of ten on the engine. That wasn't enough to go through. So then it went on to a further procedure which ended up, as you all know, at the end of October, with us adopting it under Article 7.5 which I mentioned before.
Now I would just like to say something about the engine because the engine proposal for this year was not very popular, the two race engine, but I think it's been proven that it works. Although there weren't a lot of laps in the first session this morning, cars seemed, to me at least, to be running all the time in the second session. It was controversial, but nevertheless, seven out of ten were in favour.
The real controversy comes over the engine for 2006, and as everybody here knows, it's a 2.4 V8, with restrictions on materials, but also restrictions on minimum weight and a minimum height for the centre of gravity. These restrictions are designed to prevent a rapid escalation in power. If you draw a graph of the power of the engines versus date, starting back in 1955, it goes steadily up. There is an absolutely steady progression. We hope that by bringing in these restrictions we will slow that progression down. But in addition to that, these restrictions have a fundamental effect on the cost of the engine. It is necessary, under the current rules – if you want to be fully competitive – to throw most or all of the engine away after each race. For example, the block will flex and a block is very expensive. The block then gets thrown away by some of the engine manufacturers after every race.
Well the block for the 2006 engine is heavy and it's solid in order to meet the requirement of minimum weight and minimum height of centre of gravity and will last for a long time and the same is true of many of the components. This means – and it's fundamental - that a commercial engine builder will be able to build an engine that will be competitive with even the most expensive unlimited-budget engines that some of the manufacturers produce. The big budget engine will always have an advantage in power but not such a big advantage that the lesser engine or the person who has to pay for their engine, will not be able to compete. And in fact I would guess that at the beginning of 2006, the most obvious commercial engine manufacturer, Cosworth, may even have a substantial advantage because they have an enormous pool of data about V8s and all the problems with V8s that other people don't have. But I don't know, I'm not qualified to say that that will be the case.
But the point about these engines is this. It is suggested that this was somehow undemocratic. But where would you guess the engines rule came from? Well, we didn't dream it up, it's far too technical. If you read it, you would need a PhD in metallurgy to understand some of it, and in fact, the original proposal came from Ford and from Renault. It came from Ford and Renault because they were looking to reduce the cost of this constant battle for power. We then discussed it with other teams. Ferrari went along with it very reluctantly, I have to say. There were several meetings to persuade them that these rules were right and then Toyota went along with it, again, I would say, reluctantly but their inclination was to say ‘well, if that's what everybody wants.'
So we ended up with four engine manufacturers in favour, three against, and seven teams in favour and three against. Then Ford unfortunately stopped racing in Formula One because they ran out of money but nevertheless we were left these rules. But to say that it was undemocratic with seven to three, and that we somehow dreamed it all up and forced it through is simply a travesty of the truth. What happened was it came from the manufacturers or some of them and we adopted it and I think it's a very, very sensible rule and will be enormously beneficial to Formula One.
There's another element which is power. Some people suggest we should have gone on with the three litre V10, the current rules, at least until 2008. It would have been completely mad to do that. We would have been well over a thousand horsepower this year, we would have been over 1100 horsepower before the end of the Concorde Agreement and no responsible person would let these cars loose on the circuits that we have, or some of the circuits that we have, with that kind of power. It's alright on the very modern circuits, the Bahrains, if you like, or the Shanghais, where there's massive run-off and plenty of room. But already we're getting the race promoters and a lot of the public complaining they are too far from the action. But when you take the classic circuits, places like Spa at one extreme, or Monaco, or Suzuka, there simply isn't room to build these run-off areas even if you wanted to. To allow the cars loose with that sort of power would have been grossly irresponsible and put us in an indefensible position were we ever to have been faced with an accident. Particularly when the technical working group said, for two years, that we ought to come down to 700 horsepower. Restrictive though those engines are – extraordinarily restrictive, the regulations – we won't be at 700 horsepower, we will be at closer to 800, and they will be running at 20,000 rpm I'm told and perhaps more. So the idea that we somehow dumbed down Formula One is just, again, nonsense. And so I hope that everyone understands that we could never have considered allowing the existing engines to go on, it would have been irresponsible in the extreme for safety reasons.
So to 2008: well, there we've got this situation where we've twice invited the teams to a meeting, and the first meeting we just had Ferrari, the second meeting we had three teams plus the commercial rights holder who has a say in these things being a signatory of the Concorde Agreement. We've made a lot of progress. But it's a pity that the other seven teams, so far, don't want to sit and talk because there are some fundamental questions to decide.
On the one side you've got the approach which says ‘we want to restrict costs to the point where we know we can get twelve competitive teams'. We've only got ten at the moment and at least one or two of them are perhaps not that competitive.
On the other extreme we have people saying ‘no, Formula One is the pinnacle of motor sport, it is the absolute summit and the technology should be unlimited. There should be no limits on technology other than for safety reasons. We should be free to spend money and do whatever we like'. I have enormous sympathy with that approach, because in a way it's the approach we have all had to some degree or another for many, many years. But the chassis engineers work within very tight constraints and dimensions. The engine manufacturers are now going to have to do the same sort of thing, even from 2006. So there is somewhere a compromise between the really low cost approach to Formula One, and the unlimited expenditure approach.
That compromise needs to be right, if Formula One is to remain successful. The only way you can get a really good compromise or a really good consensus is if all the major players sit down and talk. But if they won't talk, it doesn't matter. In the end we will do the best we can without them.
We will approach all the stakeholders. The teams will have, as was explained in that schedule that we sent out, a final opportunity to comment after the end of July when we send draft rules out to the all the stakeholders. Then there may be another meeting, there may not, it doesn't matter, we will set down the regulations.
It's been suggested by one or two people that we can't do this, that we can't just decree what the regulations are in 2008, we have to ask the Formula One Commission. Well, on the face of it, that's obvious nonsense because you would be asking people who are not obliged to participate in the championship and who you are not obliged to allow to participate in the championship. You don't even to have give them an entry; after 2008 there are no obligations. And also there are all sorts of detailed points: for example we have to notify all the teams with two years notice of the 2008 regulations. Well, if they were involved in making the rules, you wouldn't have to tell them, they would have been there at the Formula One Commission, just as they are with the regulations now. So that's nonsense, all our lawyers say it's nonsense, so I think we can forget that. So in the worst case, we will simply get on and make the 2008 regulations and in accordance with the Concorde Agreement we will announce them before the end of 2005.
So that's, I think, 2008. There are a lot of very interesting sub-questions on 2008. Should we have a single electronic control unit? Should we have common gearbox internals? Are those sort of things going too far? Should we reduce the downforce by 90 percent, on condition that we could actually enforce that and stop it creeping back up? If you did take the downforce down by 90 percent and you gave the cars much more grip with really big tyres and so on, you would have wheel-to-wheel racing. Is that really what we want? Do we want overtaking to be easier? Those questions are not straightforward, they are the points we would like to debate with the teams, as indeed we would like to debate things like testing where Ferrari have got a good argument for what they say, and other teams have got a good argument for what they say. One wants mileage, the other wants days. It needs discussion. If people refuse to talk, you don't get a solution.
So that, anyway, is 2008. In the longer term, and I've almost finished, we have to make sure that we don't get engine power going beyond what we can cope with, with a combination of the improved safety of the cars and improved safety of the circuits. That's very important. Obviously, exactly where the line comes nobody really knows, but we must continue with serious study and serious effort to minimise the chances of a serious accident.
There are other things: for example, it would be wonderful to have the fuel valve, the original Duckworth idea, to regulate power by restricting the amount of fuel the engine can consume per second. A lot of interesting ideas like that but again, they need discussion.
What are our aims with the rules? Well, we feel that it's essential that the drivers remain really important. We feel that the technology is important but it must not be allowed to take precedence over the drivers. Another factor we think is extremely important is management. It's interesting that if you look at the teams that are successful and the teams that are unsuccessful, the better the management, the more successful the team. Even budgets are part of management. The two teams that have been most successful in the last two or three seasons have both been exceptionally well-managed and that's an interesting factor which I think people tend to overlook. There's the question of the variety of technical equipment, how much we want, how much we don't want. There's the location of the races. There is whether we want the teams to be as equal as possible. Does that mean pushing down or lifting up? There are a lot of questions like that. It all requires discussion. If you don't have a discussion, you make no progress.
That's really all I wanted to say at this press conference. If anybody's got a question I would be delighted to answer it, and of course if anybody wants to talk about BAR I would be delighted to talk about that but I would wait for a question rather than impose it on you because you may have had enough of that already. I'm here to answer the questions if I can. So that concludes the few words I wanted to say, sorry it was so long. Who wants to ask a question?