Max Mosley Q&A

"Purely from a personal view of a spectator, I was disappointed because I think like most people I felt after qualifying and the warm-up and leading the race that long I thought that Barrichello deserved to win. So I was disappointed. But on the other hand one has to recognise that team orders exist and have existed since time immemorial."



"Both. I was surprised, but I also surprised by the vehemence of the reaction, and the thousands of e-mails and faxes that we've had and all the newspapers have had. But it does show what a tremendous interest F1 holds for a lot of people."



"Even if you prohibit it, you can never enforce it, because there are so many ways of doing it clandestinely, and you're never going to be able to check. You should never have a rule that you cannot enforce."



"It's always easy to be wise after the event, but what they could have done is announce beforehand, so there's no doubt, that if this situation arises, Barrichello in front of Schumacher, they're going to swap places. If they'd said that beforehand, everybody would have known, and I think most of the emotion would have disappeared. You could be in favour or you could be against. It was the disappointment that did the damage. The best thing is that everybody knows where they are, and then it's clear."



"That I think is not correct for me to talk about. Everybody saw for themselves what happened. The World Council will decide what to do about it. If anything."



"I think they'll focus on both, because there is also the point you can discuss about what happened on the track as well."



"I don't think it has. If anything in a funny sort of way controversy is what sport is all about. People love to go down the pub and talk about it. That's why pit stops are good, because you can say whether it should have been two or one. I think it's not bad. In the short term it may have damaged Ferrari, it may have
damaged Schumacher, but I regard that as a temporary thing."



"I think the sport as such not at all. Now it's been written about so much, everybody understands the issue. On the Monday after the race they didn't understand the issue."



"Poor old Clive James... He's not exactly an authority, and he's not a typical fan!"



"The thing is five out of the last seven years have gone to the last race. And that's never happened before, so as you say, we are a bit spoiled. Now I think you can see that anything can happen. The only thing that's certain about F1 is that nothing's certain. You get a decent Michelin tyre suddenly, and it's all different."



"We just said no more screens. It was getting worse and worse, and it had got to the stage where it was ridiculous. The problem is that if one team does it, the other team has to do it. That's what a governing body is for, it should come along and say no screens, and there are perfectly good reasons for doing that, reasons of safety and also we're supposed to supervise what goes on in the pits. In fact it says so in the code. But we can't do that if everybody is behind a screen. The teams have accepted it completely happily. More and more people were complaining, and then we decided enough was enough. It seemed to be the right thing to do."