Giblet wrote:It's a shame people can't see past the sensational headlines over the last couple of years.
You understand that F1 is largely still around at all right now because of his insight?
He started the ball rolling with the concept of budget caps before the world market tanked. When car companies will still running their budgets based on record profits, he could see it was unsustainable. He was one of the few smart enough to see the world market could tank anytime.
They laughed at him, then Honda, Toyota, and BMW in rapid succession ran away. Too expensive, for some of the biggest names in the world. Incredible the teams thought this could keep going, and they needed to be sobered. Mosley knew the breakaway would never happen, he had run a breakaway series before in F1, even hosting a couple of races, and spoke from experience.
Imagine the job it has to be to wrangle all the egos in F1, Luca included, to try to reduce costs. I can see few people, after reading many articles and editorials over the years, capable of doing what he did.
Keep in mind that being the head of the FIA is not just about F1. There is lots I despise about Mosley, but there are few in thee world that could do the job he does.
You read what I wrote about the FIAT CEO calling his own Chairman a Bella Figura? That's not high praise.
Actually I see it differently. Max encouraged and enthused about the manufacturers first getting involved, even telling Frank Williams that he was stupid not to sell out.
Towards the end of his tenure he constantly bickered and engaged in political warfare with the manufacturers effectively driving them out of F1. Let us not forget that BMW quit after the resource restriction agreement was put in place and saying that it wasn't the money.
It was also never about the money. McLaren and Ferrari both had huge budgets, among the biggest, but both also always spent within their means. McLaren in particular were known for making a profit pretty much every year until their ridiculous FIA fine. Other teams weren't always as diligent, with Toyota in particular throwing good money after bad to an amazing extent, but that is surely the fault of the teams and not something a sporting body should be getting involved in.
To Max the budget cap was all about the politics and reducing or removing the influence of the manufacturers, and with them the threat to his authority and the threat of the teams being able to fund a breakaway series. He set about making F1 unattractive to the manufacturers and instead sought to replace them with teams like USF1.
In a sport a budget cap is akin to placing ballast on successful cars, it's an unnecessary and artificial handicap. You wouldn't see the Olympics restricting richer countries spending on training centres for their athletes so that, for example, a runner from a poor country wasn't disadvantaged, just as you wouldn't see the top tennis players having to carry ballast in their pockets. If the teams have the resources let them use them. F1 shouldn't be about who has the cleverest accountants, it should be about who uses their available resources to their best advantage within the given set of rules.
So Max did some good through the safety initiatives, although even here the credit must be shared with others like Jackie Stewart, he ushered in the manufacturer age which I think was to the benefit of the sport overall, but then he threatened to tear the sport apart with his power struggle for powers sake. His lies and poison towards the end of his presidency were really making his position untenable, and as much as I dreaded Todt taking over thus far at least he has been doing a much better job. It's early days but we have yet to have a major row, the stewards appear to be taking a softer approach which has lead to improved on track action, and those manufacturers that did stay appear to be here for the long term now that things have calmed down.
