Mosley Confident Arbitration Will be Dropped

Max Mosley, the president of the FIA, believes the arbitration threat from Williams and McLaren will soon end after a unanimous agreement to the new rules was reached at Imola today.

Williams and McLaren instructed lawyers to take the FIA to the international court of arbitration after Mosley forced through some radical changes back in January. The teams were not happy with the way in which he had introduced the new regulations and instigated a public war of words between the three parties before the start of the season.

But Mosley said on Thursday that he expects the threat of a legal wrangle with the two teams to end in due course and he claimed the rules have had the perfect impact.

"I think that that will follow fairly naturally if we reach agreement on the things about 2004 and '05," said Mosley at a press conference. "To be fair to Williams and McLaren, I don't think they are out to cause difficulties but they are made a little bit uneasy by sudden and radical changes to procedures and wanted that clarified.

"But that having been said, now I think there is a great measure of agreement â€" well, total measure of agreement on 2003 â€" I suspect we'll reach agreement on 2004 and then I would expect that to follow as a matter of course."

But it appears the FIA's impending changes for 2004 - the planned banning of driver aids such as traction control and launch control - are now open for debate again. The FIA backed down on a plan to eradicate the technology from the British Grand Prix onwards until the start of next year because of the cost of policing the ban.

"The teams want to keep one-way telemetry from car to pit, traction control and launch control and we don't want to," said Mosley. "We are going to have a major meeting on that in the near future."