MPH: Mark Hughes on...

The FIA's bombshell of a new budget-capped tier of F1 from 2010 was so classic Max Mosley in its specific cleverness and the way in which it could be interpreted on two very different levels, benign and malignant. Here's a reading of each.

Benign: it addresses what has to be the major concern of F1 at the moment - cost-cutting. By creating a sub-class of F1 capped to a budget of only 10 per cent of the top spenders in 2008, it demonstrates to the addicted spenders how it doesn't have to be that way and gives F1 a survival strategy - surely only what a responsible governing body should be doing in these times of economic stringency.

Malignant: framing F1 so that competitive budgets return to early 1990s levels - ie around £30 million, the very figure the FIA has chosen as a cap - was already the intent of the team organisation, FOTA. Through consent, FOTA, and not the FIA, has delivered significant cost reductions into 2009 and anticipates being at around 50 per cent of 2008 spend by next year. This is as fast as the big teams can contract given their structures. So all the FIA has done is what FOTA was trying to do anyway, but in a much more controversial way. The FOTA plan was based on common consent and invited the cooperation of the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone, given that they shared a common goal. The FIA has spurned that invitation and imposed its own plan. This
is about control.