07/04/2015
NEWS STORY
Former FIA president Max Mosley has warned that F1 cannot continue on its current course of spend, spend, spend.
Mosley, a former racer, team owner and FIA president from 1993 to 2009, fears for the future of F1 if it continues on its current course.
While his successor keeps a worryingly low profile - something that could be never said of the Briton - Mosley is concerned that unless the teams put self-interest aside and get together and talk, the current problems will snowball.
Melbourne saw just nine teams take to the track, and whilst Manor was up and running by Malaysia, the fact is it faces an uncertain future. Furthermore, at least three teams, Sauber, Force India and Lotus are in financial difficulty and have had to ask Bernie Ecclestone for help.
Having seen the writing on the wall, Mosley worked hard to limit team spending during his time as FIA president and worked hard to introduce a budget cap. But, as ever, the teams failed to agree and whilst the problem appeared to go away for a while, it is clear that F1 has, as he puts it, "a real problem".
"The only way to deal with it is to get everybody to agree," he told DPA News, Christian Hollmann. "You can sit all the teams down and say look collectively we've got a massive problem because some of you have got enough money but most of you haven't and if we go on like this Formula One is going to collapse, so I am inviting you all to agree to a change.
"But they would have to all agree," he continued. "You can't do it without unanimity unfortunately. I think that could be done but it needs people to make very clear to them that there is a real problem."
Mosley has long argued that much of the spending in F1 is wasted, in that the money goes into technology that much of the public is totally unaware of.
"Of course the technology is amazing," he admits, "but a great deal of it is concealed so the public don't actually see - 90 per cent, 95 per cent of what goes on is not visible to an outsider and even kept secret within the teams.
"So it's changed enormously, but whether it's changed for the better; I think it's gone too far," he said. "I think it was good that it should become more sophisticated, more technical and so on but at a certain point there should have been a restriction on how much you can spend, and indeed I've tried to bring that in at the end of my time at the FIA but I didn't succeed."
The Briton believes that the way the money is currently shared out is wrong and that it should be "divided equally among the teams". Under the current system, he argues, the wealthier teams get more money and are consequently able to spend more, become even more successful and thereby attract more sponsorship. Mosley believes the teams should be spending the same with the more successful outfits increasing their earnings by attracting more sponsors.
"At least half the teams simply can't compete because they haven't got enough money, and that to me is wrong," he said. "You obviously wouldn't allow one team to run a bigger engine than another team and yet if one team has got five times as much money the effect is exactly the same as if they had a bigger engine. It's not fair from the sporting point of view."
Interestingly, despite being a close friend and former ally of Bernie Ecclestone, he feels the current governorship of the sport is wrong.
"If everything is in one pair of hands then I think you have a problem," he said. "I don't know what's in the arrangements which have been made but my understanding is that Bernie together with the teams can outvote the FIA. I might be wrong about that and shouldn't really speculate but I get the impression the FIA is not perhaps in a strong a position as it used to be."