Lunch with Max Mosley...a busy year ahead

Today I went along to a lunch thrown by Max Mosley for a small group of journalists at the Poissonerie de l'Avenue, in South Kensington, London.

The talk was, predictably, about the need for urgent cost cuts, the medals system, prospects for the season ahead, the future of the British Grand Prix, evidence of who set him up in last year's sex scandal and his own future.

On this last point I got the clear impression that he intends to stay on for another term. He has to make his decision by June and as he explained, they have a complicated system whereby prospective candidates have to draw up a list of people for the key jobs. This is a system he initiated in 2005 as it would give him early warning of anyone plotting to stand against him. Wily old fox.

Anyway as he talked about it and was saying that he wasn't sure whether he wanted to do it all again, he made it clear that all the key people want him to run for another term.

I would have thought that he is most unlikely to walk away from the job now as the next three years are absolutely critical to the future of F1, with the Formula One Teams Association providing a strong united front for the first time ever and Bernie Ecclestone and CVC very anxious to get everyone signed up beyond 2012 to protect their income stream.

He looked very fit and full of energy, much more so than at times last year. He's going deaf, though and clearly had problems hearing some of the questions. He wasn't playing for thinking time by asking for a repeat, he was genuinely straining to hear. As always he was bitingly sardonic in some of his answers and particularly scathing about the stories put about last week that former RBS chief exec Sir Fred Goodwin might stand for FIA president this summer.

On cost cutting and the rules for 2010, he was very firm. He said the target is to get budget right down, as I wrote in my posting on Honda this morning, to around £50 million. He added that it is regrettable that people will have to lose their jobs in that process, but F1 teams are not in the social service business, employing people for the sake of it. To get budgets down from £300 million to under £100 million cannot be achieved by continuing to employ 1000 people in a team.

He wants to see costs come down so much that a team can run for £50 million and be competitive. He feels that the boards of the main car companies are keen to see costs brought down dramatically and that it needs the FIA to do this because the people who manage the teams on behalf of the manufacturers would not go far enough fast enough.

What he did not say, but I have gleaned privately, is that the FIA has a package to present to FOTA of areas of non-compete, which are very extensive, along the lines I wrote about in my Honda story this morning. Ideally the FIA would like FOTA's agreement on this package, but they do have the option of ramming it through the world council in March or June under the force majeur rule - in other words arguing that the situation is so desperate in the motor industry that these measures must be taken now or else the whole survival of F1 will be threatened. That will be a major flash point with FOTA.

On other topics he said medals were not the answer to the overtaking problem and rather seemed to blame the team engineers, who sat on an overtaking working group and came up with the aero rules we have for this year, which he now feels will not improve overtaking. Max feels that slipstreaming is the answer and is getting his people to look further into moveable aerodynamics on the car which allow the car behind to be faster than the car in front by virtue of being 'towed'.

He said that Jean Todt's Ferrari contract expires in March and that will mean he loses his seat on the world council, to be replaced by another Ferrari representative (Ferrari get the seat by virtue of having been in F1 the longest). He does not think that Todt will run for FIA president, because he would not want to do so intensive a job unpaid, as the rules insist.

On customer cars he said that as far as the FIA is concerned they are eligible to race this year and said that both Toro Rosso and Force India are expected to field 'customer cars' but pointed out that there was some dispute about whether they would qualify as constructors for a share of the TV money.

On the fallout from last year's sex scandal he said that he is now virtually certain who set him up, implied that it was someone in F1 and said that he is waiting for final conclusive proof before he acts. He did not rule out legal action.

On prospects for this season, he said, "I suspect that McLaren has done a very thorough job in all areas, especially KERS (a system developed by Mercedes at a cost of £70 million) If I were Lewis Hamilton I think I would be very happy to be driving for McLaren this year, they are going to be very strong. "

Honda's chances of being on the grid in Australia he rates at 70%, suggesting that it was now a question of the negotiations between the team management and the board of the main company.

And finally he spoke about Donington and hopes for the British Grand Prix. There have been more stories recently about Donington struggling for funding and asked whether he would insist on a move back to Silverstone if the stories proved true he said that the FIA has a duty to protect the classic races, but if Bernie Ecclestone presented a calendar without a British GP he could not insist on there being one if the commercial terms on offer were clearly inferior to the going rate being offered by other countries. Having said that he did describe the UK as "the home of Grand Prix racing", so he will no doubt be reminded of that if and when Britain loses its race.

The British GP has been on the calendar since the start of Formula 1 in 1950, as has the Italian GP. It's interesting that Mosley accepts that Ferrari gets special treatment from the FIA world council and FOM in recognition of the fact that it has been there since the start, but the races do not. Heritage is important, but only up to a point.