Max allays 'customer' fears

Newey claimed that such a move would quickly lead to a situation where F1 had just three or four true manufacturers and the rest of the teams buying, creating an IndyCar-type situation.

"I don't think he's thought it through properly. He's probably a bit busy trying to make the McLaren work at the moment," Mosley said mischievously in Monte Carlo, before conceding: "Sorry, I shouldn't have said that..."

"No, he hasn't thought it through because if you take teams like Arden or, Carlin Motorsport, they are not coming into Formula 1 to buy chassis and run around in the back half of the field. They are coming into F1 because they want to end up where Williams and McLaren and BAR are, so they will start off buying a chassis, get very good young drivers, run a very good team and then start increasingly to modify the chassis they buy and then gradually move into building their own.

"They would certainly get an engine from a major manufacturer because I don't think anybody believes that in five years time we will still have seven major engine manufacturers supplying engines, that's one of the reasons we need to produce cheap engines.

"But it [customer cars] gives people a route in because, at the moment, you have to go from zero to a full competitive F1 chassis with all the research and development that implies, and it's just not possible for anyone except a big car company. We need the new blood from the independent teams because in the end, the independent teams are the life-blood of Formula 1.

"Our job [the FIA's] is to make sure that they can get in and that when they've got in, that they will have a competitive engine. The whole of the strategy depends on inexpensive competitive engines and a way in that isn't prohibitively expensive.

"I'm very confident," Mosley added. "I can't see anyone settling for being a satellite team. And of course we are the people who decide who gets an entry and who doesn't. Obviously we will keep an eye on them. If we want to, we can keep people entering year-by-year to begin with, or have rules which say that they have to increasingly make their own chassis. But this current zero to complete F1 status is virtually impossible."