Max Mosley says FIA president successor Jean Todt must confront teams

Mosley's leadership of the sport's governing body featured a number of clashes with teams, including a row over budget cap proposals in 2009 that led to threats of a breakaway series.

Todt's reign has so far been less outwardly turbulent, but disagreements over F1's future direction have continued.

Mosley believes Todt is treading carefully at present.

"He's got a completely different style. How effective it is, you can't really tell," Mosley told Sky Sports F1.

"He's still in his first mandate. I think he will go on, but he's working from nine in the morning to nine at night. It's much harder than it looks from the outside.

"If he goes on, then we'll start to see. At the moment maybe he's a little bit too reluctant to confront. He seeks consensus. It's good to have consensus but sometimes you've got to get them to just do something.

"Back in 2003 when the teams would not agree about costs, I just said 'we're just going to stop the qualifying engines and qualifying cars and we're going to have a parc ferme at six o'clock [on Saturdays].'

"The teams went berserk, but it was the right thing to do and now people agree about not having qualifying cars and engines.

"Sometimes you've got to be a bit confrontational."

The Formula One Teams' Association (FOTA) was formed amid the teams' rows with Mosley in 2009. Its influence has since waned, with champion squad Red Bull and Ferrari among several squads to withdraw from its ranks. Mosley believes FOTA will "never" truly succeed.

"The thing is the teams are competing with each other and I don't see how they will ever get together in the common interest," he argued.

"That's the function of the governing body. It should be the governing body, for example, that imposes the Resource Restriction Agreement. Are you [as a team] actually going to sue Red Bull if you think they've spent too much?"

Mosley still believes he could have implemented his original cost cap programme had newspaper revelations about his private life not interfered. He said Ferrari was the only team blocking the proposal at the time.

"[The budget cap] would've worked. It would've been completely feasible. What stopped it was I couldn't push it through.

"I ought to have been able to say to Ferrari, 'you can enter or not enter, but these are rules'. But I couldn't do that because when I had that problem with the newspaper, the two teams that stood by me were Williams and Ferrari.

"So it sort of went into the long grass and by 2009 some of the richer teams had seen that if you were a rich team and the other seven or nine were poor, you had less competition."

Click here for AUTOSPORT's full analysis of the current political state of play in F1