Max Mosley may be gone from the president's office at the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), but he's certainly not forgotten.
A divisive figure when he was running the show, it's no surprise the process Mosley put in place to bring new teams into Formula One continues to cause friction in the paddock.
One reason is obvious: The results of Mosley's initiative have been mixed at best. Of the four new teams awarded entries last June, only two — Lotus and Virgin Racing — have managed to get a car on track in pre-season testing. It seems the other two — Campos and USF1 — never had the resources required to develop a car and race an F1 season. Campos may yet make the grid, while USF1 looks dead.
Part of the problem is that the FIA chose not to bring new teams into the fold that had manufacturer backing, going with privateer outfits instead.
Things came to a head last week when Ferrari published an editorial on its website that underlined the animosity that remains six months after Mosley left.
“This is the legacy of the holy war waged by the former FIA president [Mosley],” said the editorial, which was published under the title For whom the bell tolls .
“The cause in question was to allow smaller teams to get into Formula 1.
“This is the outcome: Two teams will limp into the start of the championship, a third is being pushed into the ring by an invisible hand [of F1 commercial boss Bernie Ecclestone, Ferrari suggests] ... and, as for the fourth, well, you would do better to call on missing persons to locate it.”
The bad news of the new teams' troubles comes on the heels of a manufacturer exodus, which includes BMW, Honda, and Toyota. Another, Renault, sold a huge chunk of its team to investors earlier this year in a move most see as a prelude to its exit. So, there's little doubt that the embarrassment of having two new teams fail was something F1 didn't need.
And like it or not, the blame lies at the feet of the former FIA president and his regime, which put together the selection process and criteria that didn't seem to take into account that the new teams might need state-of-the-art facilities to build their racing cars.
Cynics might argue that the whole selection process was designed to weaken the Formula One Teams Association by ensuring its influence in the paddock was diminished by a greater number of privateer teams. This would also help give Mosley's cost-reduction initiatives more support among the teams.
For its part, FIA contended that the manufacturers' departure was simply a factor of their shrinking bottom lines in the downturn. That might have been a plausible theory had BMW, for one, not kept complaining about FIA's moves to stifle technological advances and competition between manufacturers.
In the face of this criticism from Ferrari, Mosley invited several key F1 journalists to lunch Feb. 24. In his discussions, according to a report by James Allen on his blog at jamesallenonf1.com, Mosley described Ferrari as a middle-aged woman jealous that new beautiful women were getting attention. That statement might tell F1 fans more about Mosley than Ferrari, but it's an interesting comment coming from someone who said he would step away from the sport when he left office last fall after 17 years as FIA president. Shouldn't he allow his hand-picked successor, ex-Ferrari boss Jean Todt, to respond to his former team's volley?
In reality, Ferrari may be most upset that FIA's inability to pick winners might result in Stefan Grand Prix getting the grid spot vacated when USF1 eventually folds.
With the Stefan team from Serbia supported by Ecclestone, it's only a matter of time before it is on the grid. Since the team would require a positive vote from all existing F1 outfits to replace a failed entry, it is thought the Stefan GP may simply buy USF1 and its existing grid spot to skirt the approval process. That's its only real course of action, since a yes vote from the Scuderia would not be forthcoming.
The beef with the Serbian outfit is simple: It hired former McLaren designer Mike Coughlan, who was the key figure in the 2007 Spygate incident. Coughlan was the McLaren insider who received secret Ferrari technical documents from a disgruntled employee. McLaren emerged from the scandal stripped of its world championship points and slapped with a $100-million (U.S.) fine.
And the possibility of Coughlan returning to the paddock may be the reason the poison editorial spares few in its attack, hitting at all the new teams, FIA and Ecclestone.
Despite its vitriol, the missive ends with a simple but relevant question that likely will be answered as the new teams hit the track next week at the 2010 season opener in Bahrain: “Was it all worth it?”
globedrive@globeandmail.com
