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Mosley to focus on green issues

FIA president Max Mosley has vowed to focus his remaining time in office on ensuring that Formula One becomes cheaper and greener, after triumphing in the first stage of legal action surrounding the publication of details about his private life

Mosley thinks the High Court's ruling last week that there was no Nazi element to a sex party he had is significant in freeing him up to get on with his job unhindered by the controversy about his sex life.

Speaking at length for the first time since the News of the World's story about his orgy with prostitutes, Mosley has told this week's Autosport that he wants to get on with 'tidying up' Formula One now that he has won his privacy action.

"It is obviously better to win than lose," he said about the court case. "But the key thing was winning the FIA confidence vote because, if you are an elected official and your electorate don't want you to continue, then you have to stop.

"Winning the case was good because it stopped all the nonsense about Nazism - that has now gone and that is the thing that really mattered. Now, as far as doing the job is concerned, with the Nazi thing out of the way, it (the controversy) will have no effect at all on me."

Mosley says that discussions with Bernie Ecclestone and his financial backers CVC Capital Partners about a future framework for the sport are progressing well, despite earlier fears about a power struggle for control of F1.

He also said that he would be 'disappointed' if a Concorde Agreement binding all parties was not signed by the autumn.

He also said that he hopes F1 can move towards a raft of cost cuts over the next few years, which will also help improve the environmental credentials of the sport.

He wants to free up drive train development - in exchange for manufacturers supplying independent teams free of charge.

"It does need a real reduction in cost," he said. "It needs the independent teams to be able to operate profitably and if they can't operate profitably they won't operate at all eventually because they have to run at a profit.

"At the moment, if you're an independent team like Toro Rosso or Force India, you can't run at a profit - you depend on a billionaire to subsidise you. And there just aren't enough billionaires around to subsidise. So that problem has got to be solved.

"One of the suggestions being made is the first thing you do is move the development area essentially into the drivetrain so that you're looking at the new technologies in the drivetrain, things like KERS, things like turbo generators, heat recovery, all those sort of things which are relevant to the road."

And Mosley insists that his ability to do his job and achieve his aims has not been hindered by the events of this year.

"The truth of the matter is this - that no grown up person gives the slightest damn about what other people do in their sex lives. It is not even a subject for discussion. It used to be 50 years ago that if someone was gay then it was a big drama. In England it was illegal and you could go to prison. But all that is now finished - people don't care.

"So as long as it is adults and it is consensual and it is private and, as they say, you don't frighten the horses, then nobody cares. The grown ups simply don't care and the people who do care are not worth talking to."

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