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Sep. 17th, 2009 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbIf Il Corriere della Sera is not making things up, the astonishing scandal of Nelson Piquet's false accident is only the top of the iceberg of what really happened in Formula One over the last twelve months. Behind the cut is my translation of a truly staggering report that appeared today on the site of Italy's main newspaper
Mosley had promised: "I'm not dead yet". What lies behind the orgy of backstabbing in this year's Formula One championship: the partition of the mountain of money managed by Ecclestone and Max Mosley's bloodthirsty personal vengeance
The man who is about to leave the scene is eager to settle accounts and close what are, to him, intolerable open matters; eager to checkmate his personal enemies; eager to hammer into the collective minds of the teams that FIA and FIA alone leads the game; and give powerful though indirect support to Bernie Ecclestone, who, by their own admission, was never and never will be Mosley's friend, but is not one of the enemies who had worked to bury him. Thieves may quarrel with each other, but they still go on a job together.
Max Mosley is at the head of FIA until October 23, when he is expected to leave his post to Jean Todt, who offers himself as a representative of continuity, indeed of MOsley's continuity - and here is one political success already. But Mosley must have had a private little black book with names and dates to come. Flavio Briatore's is only the last one of those he intended to draw a black line over; and now that Mr.Top-Model-Lover is out, destroyed along with Pat Symonds by the storm of the revelations about the Singapore 2008 Grand Prix, Mosley can stick another famous scalp to his collection. One is reminded of his words, after announcing that he would not stand again: "they think I am dead and buried already, but they got their sums wrong".
As he said it, so he did it. He may have been forced to step aside, but he has dragged a lot of others with him. Let Samson die with all the Philistines. Before Briatore, it had been Ron Dennis, the McLaren boss, to find out how Mosley managed sporting law. That had also come from a misdeed on the track, Lewis Hamilton's fouling of Jarno Trulli in the Australian Grand Prix, early 2009. In Melbourne as in Singapore, the FIA stewards saw nothing odd, but changed their minds within a few days, starting a domino effect which Mosley himself quietly kept going. First he had McLaren sports director, a small fish, resign; then he forced out the team principal, the one he was really after.
This way to direct events so that they snowball and turn into an avalanche to overwhelm and crush the victim seems to please the big chief. It is his way to fight a war that was started long ago, that is when the teams, determined to count for more, formed a common front. They intended to limit the power of the federation, which had among other things a habit of playing around with regulations, as well as to insure that they got a larger slice of the cake of commercial rights, which Ecclestone had thus far been carving as he pleased.
FOTA's first visible act took place last March in Geneva. But the association, led by Luca di Montezemolo, had been formed the previous summer, and the final coat of paint had already been given by the time of the Monza Grand Prix. After years of feuds and internecine warfare, the teams abandoned their quarrelsome anarchy where everybody could look after himself and anyone who interfered with another was beaten back, and found common views as to their future direction. That was enough to raise the hair both on Mosley's and on Ecclestone's heads. Mosley was hostile from the word go; Ecclestone played conciliator, went in every direction, and did just as much to confuse and break up the opposition.
Mosley, on the other hand, started working on a multi-faceted, diabolical grand plan. On the one side there has been an attack on automotive corporations who had dared to publicly censor him at the time of the famous bondage orgy in Chelsea. Monday, with a permanent smile on his face, and swearing he wanted nothing but good things for everyone, has done so much to weaken their position that (with a little help from the credit crunch) Honda and BMW have left the sport. Toyota was within an inch of following them, and Renault would have, had it not offered up Briatore.
Dear Max then came up, according to Formula One law and order - Max' law and Mosley's orders - with a string of normative novelties justified by austerity. A smart and basically ironclad choice (if there is a crisis, people must save), but used as a provocation: his slimming cure looked more like starvation. There was no way that bodies with budges of three to four hundred million euros could reduce them to forty-four million within a few months. But that was not really the issue; it was only an excuse to prove and break the opposition's front. As it turned out, months of exhausting negotiations brought Force India and Williams over to Mosley, with at least another team coming close.
At that point, Ferrari, Toyota, Renault and Red Bull were seriously intending not to join the 2010 championship, and an opposition show was being seriously mooted. McLaren were all for this solution, but had to keep their heads low because FIA had it in a hammerlock. Meanwhile Mosley wet ahead with the ridiculous admission of improbable teams, and screaming at everyone else at the top of his voice: "Either you sign, or you are out", Mosley was coming up with another bright idea.
Flashback to the previous winter. The former Honda not only is reborn as Brawn GP, but is found to go like lightning. How come? It carries double diffusors - the tail end of the car, which directs the exit air flow from the undercarriage. This makes it impossible to catch for those who, following a FIA rule to reduce aerodynamic effects, have designed cars with a simple slide. Williams, a team very friendly with Mosley, adopts the double diffusors, as do Toyota. The other seven teams protest and appeal, but FIA confirms that double diffusors are legal and that the stewards who had accepted them at previous races had done nothing wrong. That is how this current, curious, and some would call faked, championship, was started. In the end, the teams have managed to elbow out Mosley, but that is hardly the end of the dictator chairman. Nelsinho Piquet's very late denunciation of Briatore and Symonds, swiftly exploited by Mosley and Ecclestone, is there to prove it.
Arianna Ravelli
Flavio Vanetti
17 settembre 2009
Mosley had promised: "I'm not dead yet". What lies behind the orgy of backstabbing in this year's Formula One championship: the partition of the mountain of money managed by Ecclestone and Max Mosley's bloodthirsty personal vengeance
The man who is about to leave the scene is eager to settle accounts and close what are, to him, intolerable open matters; eager to checkmate his personal enemies; eager to hammer into the collective minds of the teams that FIA and FIA alone leads the game; and give powerful though indirect support to Bernie Ecclestone, who, by their own admission, was never and never will be Mosley's friend, but is not one of the enemies who had worked to bury him. Thieves may quarrel with each other, but they still go on a job together.
Max Mosley is at the head of FIA until October 23, when he is expected to leave his post to Jean Todt, who offers himself as a representative of continuity, indeed of MOsley's continuity - and here is one political success already. But Mosley must have had a private little black book with names and dates to come. Flavio Briatore's is only the last one of those he intended to draw a black line over; and now that Mr.Top-Model-Lover is out, destroyed along with Pat Symonds by the storm of the revelations about the Singapore 2008 Grand Prix, Mosley can stick another famous scalp to his collection. One is reminded of his words, after announcing that he would not stand again: "they think I am dead and buried already, but they got their sums wrong".
As he said it, so he did it. He may have been forced to step aside, but he has dragged a lot of others with him. Let Samson die with all the Philistines. Before Briatore, it had been Ron Dennis, the McLaren boss, to find out how Mosley managed sporting law. That had also come from a misdeed on the track, Lewis Hamilton's fouling of Jarno Trulli in the Australian Grand Prix, early 2009. In Melbourne as in Singapore, the FIA stewards saw nothing odd, but changed their minds within a few days, starting a domino effect which Mosley himself quietly kept going. First he had McLaren sports director, a small fish, resign; then he forced out the team principal, the one he was really after.
This way to direct events so that they snowball and turn into an avalanche to overwhelm and crush the victim seems to please the big chief. It is his way to fight a war that was started long ago, that is when the teams, determined to count for more, formed a common front. They intended to limit the power of the federation, which had among other things a habit of playing around with regulations, as well as to insure that they got a larger slice of the cake of commercial rights, which Ecclestone had thus far been carving as he pleased.
FOTA's first visible act took place last March in Geneva. But the association, led by Luca di Montezemolo, had been formed the previous summer, and the final coat of paint had already been given by the time of the Monza Grand Prix. After years of feuds and internecine warfare, the teams abandoned their quarrelsome anarchy where everybody could look after himself and anyone who interfered with another was beaten back, and found common views as to their future direction. That was enough to raise the hair both on Mosley's and on Ecclestone's heads. Mosley was hostile from the word go; Ecclestone played conciliator, went in every direction, and did just as much to confuse and break up the opposition.
Mosley, on the other hand, started working on a multi-faceted, diabolical grand plan. On the one side there has been an attack on automotive corporations who had dared to publicly censor him at the time of the famous bondage orgy in Chelsea. Monday, with a permanent smile on his face, and swearing he wanted nothing but good things for everyone, has done so much to weaken their position that (with a little help from the credit crunch) Honda and BMW have left the sport. Toyota was within an inch of following them, and Renault would have, had it not offered up Briatore.
Dear Max then came up, according to Formula One law and order - Max' law and Mosley's orders - with a string of normative novelties justified by austerity. A smart and basically ironclad choice (if there is a crisis, people must save), but used as a provocation: his slimming cure looked more like starvation. There was no way that bodies with budges of three to four hundred million euros could reduce them to forty-four million within a few months. But that was not really the issue; it was only an excuse to prove and break the opposition's front. As it turned out, months of exhausting negotiations brought Force India and Williams over to Mosley, with at least another team coming close.
At that point, Ferrari, Toyota, Renault and Red Bull were seriously intending not to join the 2010 championship, and an opposition show was being seriously mooted. McLaren were all for this solution, but had to keep their heads low because FIA had it in a hammerlock. Meanwhile Mosley wet ahead with the ridiculous admission of improbable teams, and screaming at everyone else at the top of his voice: "Either you sign, or you are out", Mosley was coming up with another bright idea.
Flashback to the previous winter. The former Honda not only is reborn as Brawn GP, but is found to go like lightning. How come? It carries double diffusors - the tail end of the car, which directs the exit air flow from the undercarriage. This makes it impossible to catch for those who, following a FIA rule to reduce aerodynamic effects, have designed cars with a simple slide. Williams, a team very friendly with Mosley, adopts the double diffusors, as do Toyota. The other seven teams protest and appeal, but FIA confirms that double diffusors are legal and that the stewards who had accepted them at previous races had done nothing wrong. That is how this current, curious, and some would call faked, championship, was started. In the end, the teams have managed to elbow out Mosley, but that is hardly the end of the dictator chairman. Nelsinho Piquet's very late denunciation of Briatore and Symonds, swiftly exploited by Mosley and Ecclestone, is there to prove it.
Arianna Ravelli
Flavio Vanetti
17 settembre 2009
