Max Mosley, president of the FIA from 1993 to 2009, has died aged 81.
A huge influence on the direction of the sport both before and during his presidency, invariably working in tandem with his commercial foil Bernie Ecclestone, he was also the founding impetus behind the March racing car constructor which thrived in F1 in the 1970s and in Champ Car and at the Indianapolis 500 in the ‘80s.
The son of fascist party leader Sir Oswald Mosley and the former Lady Diana Mitford, he was born in wartime prison where his mother was being held as a suspected Nazi sympathiser.
He took refuge in racing as an amateur driver in the 1960s, relieved to find an environment where he could be an anonymous presence.
He raced as far as Formula 2 and though he was never considered a front rank driver his sharp intellect and legal training came to be powerful assets in his burgeoning career within the business side of the sport.
Mosley co-founded March in 1969 to manufacture customer racing cars but ambitiously decided an F1 programme was the best way to publicise the company. He instructed his partner in the enterprise, designer Robin Herd, to design and build a car for the 1970 season.
The March 701 qualified first and second at the opening round of the championship, for the South African Grand Prix. Jackie Stewart in a Ken Tyrrell-entered March won that year’s Spanish Grand Prix. Ronnie Peterson finished runner-up in the 1971 World Championship driving a March 711.
But that was pretty much the constructor’s peak at the top level of the sport and its F1 programmes were always secondary to selling cars – most notably in Formula 2 where March was the dominant constructor in the ‘70s and into the ‘80s.
Mosley’s initial involvement in F1 at a time of considerable unrest led to him working very closely with Brabham team owner Bernie Ecclestone, initially as his legal advisor.
They subsequently founded and directed the Formula One Constructors Association – which completely changed the commercial landscape and power base of the sport.
Banding the British teams together, they negotiated with race organisers as a single entity for prize money, obliterating the old model of each team doing its individual deal with each organiser and being played off against each other.
The combined intellects of Mosley and Ecclestone ran rings around anyone they negotiated with and the teams all began to get richer and more powerful.
The governing body of the time considered Mosley and Ecclestone a threat to its control of F1 and for some time in the late 70s/early 80s, then FIA president Jean Marie Balestre effectively declared war on their enterprise.
This led to the infamous FIA/FOCA split of 1981 whereby the threat of a parallel world championship led to a compromise and the establishment of the Concorde Agreement, the covenant on which F1 has largely run ever since.
Mosley would ideally liked to have entered the world of politics but knew his family associations made this almost impossible. Instead he entered motorsport politics, mounting a successful campaign to relieve Balestre of leadership of the sport’s governing body.
He took over the FIA presidency in 1993 and although he vowed that he wouldn’t be getting much involved in F1 ‘because it more or less runs itself,’ he didn’t stay true to that.
Ecclestone was leased the commercial rights to the world championship by the FIA and together the two men bestrode F1, their rule absolute and often controversial.
Mosley expanded the FIA’s role into road safety and mobility and in doing so enhanced his power considerably. He was also a leading advocate in the ongoing safety campaign of the sport.
He was frequently at loggerheads with the teams and automotive car manufacturers in F1 who resented his autocratic control of the sport, and it was his radical cost cap initiative that led to the teams threatening a breakaway championship in 2009, in a neat inversion of history.
They would call it off, the teams said, almost in unison, if Mosley agreed not to stand for re-election later that year. He capitulated to this and backed the – ultimately successful – campaign of Jean Todt as his successor.
