The Full Transcript of Max Mosley's Media Briefing

The FIA has provided an unedited transcript of informal exchanges during lunches hosted by Max Mosley for the representatives of the British media, in London on the 7th and 8th February.

The full transcript appears below. Names of the participating journalists have been omitted.

Q: Is the governing body trying to keep down costs in Formula One in any way?

Max Mosley: I think there are things that could be done which would reduce the costs without reducing the spectacle. You can never stop people spending money, but I think there are savings to be made and we are talking to the teams about various measures. For example, reducing the number of engines they use, having a rule about the number of engines you can use.

Q: Would that also increase the spectacle. For instance if Schumacher blew his engine and finishes his supply…

Max Mosley: …. And has, for example, to start at the back of the grid, or halfway down the grid. Absolutely. I think everybody feels this is a sensible way to go, and everybody knows that an engine could last all weekend if you ran it slower. But it's not quite that simple, because if you know that an engine has to do, let's say, 800 kilometres rather than 350, although you could make today's engines do 800 kilometres, you need to… if you built an engine specifically to do 800 kilometres it would not be the same as an engine that has been built to do 350 but is being made to do 800 by running it slower. To optimise would take them some time, but that's not necessarily an argument against doing it quickly.

Q: But if you just limited it to three engines, wouldn't that save costs enormously.

Max Mosley: Yes, but I think a lot of teams…they all have different arrangements. Some teams probably only use two engines per weekend; others use more. Some people use qualifying engines in that they run the engine faster and they run it hotter, and they only run it for a short distance. So probably the fairest thing to do is to have a fairly radical change so it's the same for everybody, but it's something we need to negotiate… we are actually talking about it to the teams.

Q: How has it gone down with the teams?

Max Mosley: Most of them are in favour. In fact the only argument has been about when, not if. I don't think there's much debate about the if.

Q: So that would be just one engine for the weekend, would it?

Max Mosley: Ultimately, yes.

Q: Surely people can relate to that easier as well, because their engine lasts….

Max Mosley: Exactly. If you tell the average person watching that they change the engine before qualifying, and they change it again after qualifying before the race, he would be astonished. It brings nothing. As long as the rules are the same for everybody, it's actually fairer. All you do is save a lot of money.

Q: Is there a limit at the moment?

Max Mosley: None at all. You can change them as often as you like.

Q: It would be one engine per car per weekend?

Max Mosley: And then using the spare car would have to count as using an engine.

Q: So if Schumacher's engine blew in practice on Friday, (then indistinguishable)

Max Mosley: No, then he puts in another engine and has to start at the back of the grid.

Q: So one engine…

Max Mosley: One engine per car and if you are forced… Obviously if it blows up in the race, that's the end of it anyway. If it blows up before the race, you can change it for the race, but you have to start from, let's say, the back of the grid. That's what's being talked about at the moment. Or ten places back.

Q: So it's a penalty of some sort.

Max Mosley: Big penalty, yes.

Q: So what did you say about the spare car Max?

Max Mosley: If you use the spare car, that would have to count as using an engine, using a second engine.

Q: What if say, there's an incident at the first corner of the race, and they go back to take…

Max Mosley: No, that would be alright. Once you're into the race, that would be OK. No, you've got to have a rule to stop them systematically….

Q: That could jumble up the grid…

Max Mosley: Well, every now and then you would get a leader of the championship forced to start either half way down or at the back of the grid, and every time that's happened, very rarely in the last few years, because of rain or something, it has improved the race enormously.

Q: What's the earliest date when you can introduce the engine restriction ruling?

Max Mosley: 2003, because it's a sporting regulation, so we can bring it in 2003 provided it's voted through before the 31st of October. I think there's a strong body of opinion within the teams in favour of doing something and it remains to be seen whether we can actually get it through all the instances.

The Formula One Commission has to pass it which means getting 18 votes out of 26 and the teams have got 12 votes, the organizers and promoters have got eight votes and then there's a few others like us.

Q: What about the manufacturers? Are they sympathetic to this?

Max Mosley: Yes, and no. They all like the idea because it will save them money, but there is a reluctance to do it too quickly, because they've just developed whatever it is, and they don't want to have all the cards thrown up in the air. But on the other hand there is an argument for doing it fairly quickly. There's no doubt that money is going to be tighter.

Q: But we've gone through recessions before, haven't we?

Max Mosley: Yes, there are a lot of economies that a team can make before it actually packs up.

Q: Are there any other teams having real problems?

Max Mosley: I think yes is the answer. I think a lot of them are having great difficulty putting together the sort of budget they need to be reasonably competitive. But that's always been the case because unless you've got the same budget as whichever is the richest team, you haven't got enough money.

Q: Is there anyone close to getting into the situation Prost did?

Max Mosley: Not that I know of. No, but then when you are in that situation, you tend to keep it very quiet, because the creditors start pressing.

Q: Isn't there a danger in a limitation like this that you're effectively reducing Formula One, you're bringing it down to the common denominator and bringing everybody down to the level of Tom Walkinshaw and Eddie Jordan, rather than making them come up to the level of Ferrari and McLaren and Williams?

Max Mosley: Well, first of all I think that's only true financially, it's not true in any other respect, and in a way it's more of a challenge to build an engine for 800 kilometers than for 350. Or a more interesting challenge, or a more relevant challenge. The thing is that the top teams will still be the top teams but everybody's costs, whether they are at the front or the back, will go down and for the people at the back, that's actually very important.

Q: That's very relevant for the road car market too, isn't it?

Max Mosley: I don't know enough about engines in detail, but in principle, it must be more relevant to build something that does 800 kms than something that does 300 kms. Ultimately, I think we should get rid of a lot of the exotic materials. We should try not to use materials which would never ever be used in a road car. An example that we have got rid of is aluminium beryllium. The chance of using that in a road car was just about nil. What has happened is that the whole of the American space and defence programme has been opened up.

Companies have made these exotic materials for the American defence industry and are now offering them on the open market so they go round the Formula One teams offering these magic materials. Because they are the only people making it, whatever it costs to actually manufacture, they can charge more or less what they like because they do the job. Something like aluminium beryllium is just so much better than any available material that you would probably never use it in a road car. It's also toxic to work on.

Q: Surely that line of argument is that if somebody comes across an exotic material that is more enduring and is better than something else but then spends a fortune trying to find that and using it but will have no road application, no application for cars, because it's too expensive, you would have a million pound Ford Fiesta.

Max Mosley: Yes, well that is the argument against it. The purists would say that you should have the freedom to do that. We can't do that (banning materials) without the teams all agreeing. We can't ban titanium or whatever unless everybody agrees.

Q: Don't you think you will have Mario Illien or Paolo Martinelli locking themselves away for six months to develop some phenomenally high powered engine that will last for 800 kilometers and the actual expenditure that they have piled into that development are just the figures…

Max Mosley: That's undoubtedly true as far as development is concerned but the resulting extremely expensive engine, if you are only allowed to use one per weekend, will not be as expensive as if you are allowed to use two, or three or four. And they are doing that already. Whatever it takes, they are prepared to do, because the honour of whoever it is, Mercedes, BMW or Ferrari, is at stake. But if you limit the number, then it doesn't matter what they do, they can't spend as much money as if they've got a smaller number of engines.

Q: Do you think it's the FIA's responsibility to limit the amount of money if the teams are prepared to spend it?

Max Mosley: To some extent we should not interfere in anything unless the sport itself is threatened, but when it gets to the stage where it becomes threatening to the sport, then I think we do because otherwise we risk having no Formula One, and if we don't do it, who is going to? The small teams â€" everybody says, well of course they want that â€" and the big teams want to defend what they've got. If you're the referee or the neutral arbiter, arguably it's your duty then to try and solve the problem. But again, we can only do it if the majority of the teams are in favour.

Q: Is there any interest in the twelfth place on the grid (the twelfth place in the paddock)?

Max Mosley: A lot of people have made inquiries. But there are only two possibilities. One is that somebody goes along to the liquidator, acquires whatever Prost is, and then comes to us and says 'I satisfy all the conditions, I've got an entry, I'm going to be in Australia.' And provided they really did satisfy all the conditions in the various agreements, there is an entry, he's paid the fee and he could turn up in Australia. That's possibility number one.

Possibility number two is that Prost disappears in which case no one will fill that place this year and then it will be open to a new organization to enter the championship in 2003. If they want to do that, they've got to put up $48 million with their entry, which is what keeps people serious. You know that if somebody sends you a cheque for 48 mil they are serious. And then of course, as you know, we then give it them back in 12 monthly installments starting with their first race. For example, Toyota will start to get their money back, as of Australia, with interest.

In fact what we've done, in their case, we've got a bank guarantee which they pay for, so if they don't turn up we cash it. They haven't actually stumped up the cash. If we were actually given the 48 mil, it would just sit on account, the interest would accumulate and we would give it them back in 12 installments.

Q: Would the team have to be called Prost?

Max Mosley: If they want to be in Australia? There's a complicated rule. They can change the team name anyway. It could be called Mosley Racing, but the chassis name can be named with the consent of the FIA which we wouldn't unreasonably withhold, but only every five years. Now the chassis name changed from Ligier to Prost, which is a point, but when the five years is up, I don't know. It's probably just up. So then they can also change the chassis name, so strictly speaking, I can pitch up, it could be March Engineering Limited and it could be a March. That's a thought, isn't it!?

Q: But there's actually no chance of anybody pitching up in Australia, is there?

Max Mosley: I wouldn't go that far. If somebody really wanted to.

Q: Couldn't Craig Pollock…

Max Mosley: If he'd got the money. He wouldn't need the 48 mil but he would have to satisfy the liquidator. You could probably do a deal with the liquidator because I'm sure he would rather take some of the money than none of it, but whoever it is would have to get going. There's not a lot of time for that but it could happen.

Q: Jean Todt suggested that there was no way they could supply engines, and there are so many debts as well, of course.

Max Mosley: Well first of all you've got to pay off last year's money. Ferrari are going to say if you don't pay, we're not going to give you an engine. That's what the liquidator said. Then they probably will want money on account, and then might not have the engines anyway. I don't know. I just suspect that if somebody had unlimited funds, I suspect they could be in Australia.

Q: Do you know of anybody with unlimited funds?

Max Mosley: No. I don't believe there's anybody on the horizon.

Q: So it's more likely to be the 48 million dollars then?

Max Mosley: Yes. I think it is.

Q: What about companies like General Motors, Volkswagen? Have you had indications about them?

Max Mosley: There have been no serious inquiries from any of the major manufacturers, but there is constant interest, there's a dialogue going on, but there's no reason to suppose they are about to come in.

Q: What is the technical situation at the FIA in relation to the administration of a possible new series by the manufacturers in 2008? Would there be a seamless transition in the FIA's role?

Max Mosley: I think if that were to happen, you would almost certainly have two series because I think whoever, at that stage, owned the rights to the Formula One World Championship, would run the FIA Formula One World Championship and they would get engines from somewhere and they would get teams, even if it was only Formula 3000. And we would be under certain obligations which we are under. At the same time, we would regulate the new series. Under our system it would be an international series, like there are many others already, which we would regulate, which we would put on the calendar, providing it was safe and all the rest of it.

In the worst case… if you don't get a deal, you will get a split and when you have a split, in the end, somebody wins and somebody loses and it just destroys everything. We've seen it in America but as far as we go, we would regulate the new series and we would obviously fulfill our obligations under the existing mandate. But I think in real life this would never happen, there would be a deal. It's very easy to say that 'I'm going to do whatever in 2008'.

I think that the reality is that the single championship is so much more valuable than the sum of the value of two championships that there is no way a deal is not going to be done, because there is so much scope for the negotiations. They can't fail to come to an arrangement and as there are another five or six years to go, there's obviously going to be a deal. It's just a question of what the deal is. My own bet would be that we will see a deal within the next 12 to 18 months.

Q: If the Kirch Group goes broke, this could mean that the Formula One rights are hawked around like a packet of chips?

Max Mosley: Yes, that could happen. Up to a point, we have a right of veto, we still have the 'Don King clause' in there. It's not that simple. They can't just go off and sell it.

Q: What about Murdoch?

Max Mosley: Interesting. And of course, somehow, I don't see that happening but I might be wrong, but quite genuinely, if somebody did acquire the whole thing from Kirch, our first objective would be to work with them, provided we have sensible people to work with, we will work with them. In the end, we just want a very very good successful championship. Whoever bought it would really want the same thing, so there shouldn't be any great difficulty.

Q: Some of the people I've spoken to say that there needs to be a deal done before the start of the season.

Max Mosley: Relating to Kirch? I don't think that's the case. I think the manufacturers' calculation is that Kirch desperately needs to do a deal, that he's under pressure at the moment, and I'm not sure that that's necessarily the case. You see, people close to Kirch, if you suggest he's in trouble, say that he's been like that for 40 years. He's always run his business on the edge, he really has. The way the whole of that thing happened is extraordinary, starting off with Morgan Grenfell and so on. Extraordinary story.

Q: What do you think are the prospects of the World Rally championship in its televised form?

Max Mosley: I think it could work. What I like about it is that the view from those cars is hardly ever through the windscreen, it is always through one side window or the other, and particularly on the snow, when you see the on-board camera, you can actually see and live with what they're doing. You can really understand what's happening.

I don't know if anybody's had a go on the PlayStation. I'd never had a go on it, but they had one in Monaco. Can you imagine, I'd never touched the thing? I was made to sit down in front of all the journalists… obviously I turned the thing over in no time, but with that funny steering wheel thing, you can absolutely feel it, you feel the understeer, the oversteer, you can feel the vibrations. It's so realistic. I got off it and asked Richard Burns 'it's much more difficult than the real thing isn't it?' and he confirmed that it was. I think it's going to be a huge success.

I don't think it will damage Formula One in any way. It's so different. It's not like oval racing where there's some sort of relationship, the cars are vaguely similar and it is a close circuit. It's ordinary cars or apparently, on open roads, they have to be road legal to get from one stage to another, there's a passenger, there has to be. You can associate with it, it's got so many elements that people can associate with.

I once went for a ride with Colin McRae up in the forests and I must say, it was very very impressive, but at a certain point, to my surprise, he said 'why don't we swap seats?' So I found myself driving this World Rally car, and he was completely calm. I didn't really know the way so a lot of the time I was going at what the police would call an inappropriate speed and all he would say was 'I think this one's a bit tight', meaning ' you'd better slow down!' I thought I was going like hell, but then I watched the video afterwards and he was impressive, but then there was this pathetic old boy pootling along. And you suddenly realize what the difference is between…

The only difficult thing was starting. It's like starting a racing car, you forget what you're doing and you stall it. And everybody is standing around. So the second time you remember that it's got turbos and limiters and stuff; the thing to do is to wind it up and you drop the clutch and shower everyone with stones and take off like a rocket. Colin said afterwards 'if we go on like this there's going to be a big crash.' Of course, we didn't. After that, it's incredibly easy to drive, except the gearchange is funny because it's up on the dashboard, but the feel of the car, the way it slides around on the gravel, to drive it slowly is very easy. It's like all racing cars, what's difficult is driving them quickly.

The other thing they do is if they get into a big slide, all of us would lift off. They just floor it and rely on the four wheel drive to pull them out of it. It's extraordinary. I think they are amazing drivers. So I think rallying is going to be a big success. I think that if David Richards keeps on at it and doesn't have problems of any kind, it should be a really big big success.

Q: Do you think that he can manage both Formula One and the World Rally championship?

Max Mosley: Yes, in a way it's probably good that he's doing both, because he simply cannot get too involved in either team, which if he's going to run the World Rally championship commercial side, it's better that he doesn't. Whereas, if he just had the Subaru team, he might be too involved in the team. Now, everybody knows that he's pretty independent.

The first thing I said to him about BAR was 'are you going to sit on the pit wall with the headphones?' because that to me is the great test. And he said he was not, so if he doesn't and he has a sporting director, he keeps back a bit, but keeps an eye on it. I think he will probably be very successful.

Q: He seems to have the same entrepreneurial spirit that you recognize in Bernie, hasn't he? One of the few people….

Max Mosley: He has a completely different sort of approach to Bernie but demonstrably successful. Prodrive is big business. David is very very good. There's no reason why he shouldn't build the World Rally championship into something that is as commercially valuable and successful as Formula One, no reason at all. If he does that, he will become very rich. I doubt if he will get as much out of it as Bernie managed. That was a bit special…

Q: Could he buy the rights for 100 years?

Max Mosley: We are negotiating with David. We currently have a deal with him until 2010, just like in Formula One, and the plan is to change it into a 100 year deal and we have the understanding with the European Commission that we will do that within a reasonable period and that's all part of the deal with the European Commission, that we will divest ourselves of the rally commercial rights for a very long period, just like Formula One. We are well down the road with that. In fact it's more our fault than David's that it hasn't made more progress but we're well within the time frame that we've agreed with the Commission.

Q: So now you've got this war chest, what are you going to do with it, the foundation, your long term plans?

Max Mosley: Well we've moved the whole lot into the foundation. We've got 313.6 million dollars, that was from Formula One, and we put 300 of that into a foundation, and the foundation of the board has 11 people. The chairman is Rosario Alessi, he used to be president of the Automobile Club of Italy. He's no longer in that position, he's finished his term. He's the chairman, and various other major figures, more from motoring than from motor sport.

We divided the 300 million into three funds and we've got three fund managers looking after the three and we anticipate being able to spend about 10 million Euros a year and it's going to be mainly on safety issues to do with motor sport and also the roads, lot of road safety things. We're talking to the World Health Organisation about a worldwide campaign and also various other international organizations, which means we've got a bigger road safety budget than the EU which is actually quite good.

And so, for example, what are we working on at the moment? We're finishing off the FIA crash helmet. We're looking at safety to do with safety fences and things of that kind in Formula One. We're pursuing crash testing in ordinary road cars. We've got a whole stack of projects in 2002, all of which are under way for which we have put the money aside already. And then we will be looking at applications from all over the place for different programmes of one kind or another.

Q: Does car jacking come into your remit?

Max Mosley: It could do. It's not something we've looked at. We haven't had an application or anything to do that but it's clearly becoming a problem.

Q: Concerning Silverstone: how long is it going be before we see the circuit reconstructed?

Max Mosley: I don't know. You will have to ask them. Because our immediate priority has been to try and get the traffic flow in and out. It's not purely altruism. It's just that the image for motor sport, the way it's been run, is so bad. Octagon have got all sorts of plans for improving the circuit, and the message they're getting from us, and also from Bernie, is first the roads, then the public, then the team facilities. What they're actually doing, beyond the roads, I don't know.

Q: It is a fact that it's one of the few circuits in the world that doesn't have permanent facilities in terms of grandstands.

Max Mosley: Some of the stands are permanent, aren't they? The thing is, you'll have to ask Bernie. I know that's always the great get-out but I actually don't know what the plans are. As far as the stands are concerned, whether they are safe or not is the local health and safety, so we don't really get involved. To be honest with you, I didn't realize they were still semi-permanent.

Q: What's the situation about other potential Grands Prix in other countries; are they coming and going?

Max Mosley: As far as I know, the Moscow one seems to be getting quite serious. There are some very serious projects in the Middle East. The problem is that we are at the limit. There really should be 16 and we're still running on 17, so we have to lose one or two.

Q: What are the ones at risk in Europe?

Max Mosley: The one that was a little bit on the end of the rope was Austria, but that's now calmed down. Spa? Only if there's a big problem over the tobacco. You see on the tobacco front, everything's building up to 2006 being the last year, and we are seeking international agreement on that. The World Health Organisation is on board, the Australians have done that, which is really south-east Asia. I think it's probable that the EU will move their date from July 2005 to 2006. If Belgium maintains their 2003 date then they would come off until we get to 2007 when everybody will be no tobacco, and of course if you're out for three or four years, you might not come back. But they do know that and Belgium, of all places, is not the most obvious country to be completely out of step with the rest of the EU. Assuming that the dates get moved we think it probably will.

Q: Is Moscow really serious; aren't there problems?

Max Mosley: It does depend who one talks to, but of the ones being talked about, that seems the most imminent. There are a lot of people with ideas; even Turkey. The new member of the World Council is from Turkey. He wants to get a World Championship rally, he wants to have a Grand Prix.

Q: What will be the Grand Prix split in five years time?

Max Mosley: Well, it ought to be less in Europe and more outside, but it's incredibly difficult to get that done. When you want to get rid of one of the Grands Prix, you have a complete uproar in the locality, which is nice in one way because it shows how important they are. I wouldn't like to predict, but we will probably lose two or three in the EU, I would guess, over the next five years. I think we will have to.

Q: Can it be done by limiting those who have two races to one?

Max Mosley: The rational approach is that. On the other hand, at the moment the importance of Germany economically in Formula One is so great that it entirely justifies two. It wouldn't be fair to mention them, but if you compare Austria or Hungary to either of the German or even either of the Italian races, they just are less important, but you can't really say that, it seems unkind, but it is a fact. Things change so quickly, but at the moment, Germany is massive. But they could all retire, those drivers, and suddenly it could change. Tennis was massive in Germany ten years ago with Boris Becker and now it's….

Q: Do you see countries in the Far East taking over?

Max Mosley: I think we will probably see maybe one in the Middle East, maybe one in Russia and maybe another in the Far East and maybe another one in the Americas somewhere.

Q: China is the obvious place for commercial expansion…

Max Mosley: China is very difficult because of the money and the need to build the infrastructure and the political difficulties within China, but there are three very serious consortia in China. One is based in Shanghai, one based in a town whose name I can't remember but where Renault and one or two big car manufacturers have factories, and then one near Beijing. That's quite apart from Xhuhai which has been around for some time. It is suitable but we found that it was logistically impossible. We got very close to having one there, but it sounds silly, but you couldn't get the low-loaders under the bridges and there were no facilities for unloading the plane at the time. It was really quite complicated, but now that's all gone a little bit quiet.

Q: What would be the ultimate Grand Prix?

Max Mosley: China. Certainly we do need China. The other place that there's a very serious plan is India. If you've got India and China, you've got almost half the world's population or getting on that way.

Q: How serious is the Indian one? Where is it?

Max Mosley: It's nearby Bombay. I haven't talked to them myself, they talk to Bernie. The beauty of Bernie doing the commercial side is that we don't have to bother with these endless conversations. When he's got a deal, he comes along to us and says 'is this OK?' and we go and have a look at the circuit. You get two or three people a week. They write to us and we shift it all off to Bernie.

Q: What's going to happen post-Bernie? Who is going to control the commercial side of the sport?

Max Mosley: First of all, I'm sure Bernie will out-last me, so it's not really my number one worry, but I think his successor would be an individual and I think he would more likely be a manager than an entrepreneur and I think he would probably be somebody from outside motor sport, as you would get someone to manage any big successful enterprise. There are ways of finding them. I think it would a person of that kind.

I think the idea of it being a retired team manager or a retired driver is pure fantasy. Or even a retired motor industry executive. There are a lot of people fantasizing about this, but I think it would be a serious manager recruited on the same basis as if you were recruiting somebody to run ICI or whatever.

Q: The question would then be who would do the recruiting?

Max Mosley: Currently, that would be the Kirch Group and they would undoubtedly consult us because we would have to work very closely with the person. It would be down to them. I suppose they would use head-hunters â€" all the classic methods.

Q: You seem to be more involved in the traditional side of running the sport, the governing body.

Max Mosley: The deal with the European Commission is that we're not involved in the commercial side at all. We're the regulator, so we are concerned with the safe, fair and orderly conduct of motor sport, which is a very broad remit, but how people make money out of it is their problem. That's why, if the manufacturers did start a series, we would be able to regulate that and regulate Formula One and what we must not do is discriminate against another series. What the Commission was concerned about… they said 'if you've got big financial interests in Formula One, however fair-minded you may be, you have an incentive to suppress any potential rival, so why don't you get rid of all of that and then you have no incentive to suppress a rival?' It's going to be interesting to see if other sports follow that pattern.

Q: Do you think Premier I will get off the ground?

Max Mosley: We're delighted if there's any new forms of motor sport coming along and we will give them every assistance.

Q: What are your thoughts about Formula 3000, Max?

Max Mosley: It's a little bit worrying, because, on the one side, if you don't say 'everybody who comes into Formula One has to go through Formula 3000' you're weakening it…people spend a fortune doing Formula 3000 and then someone comes out of Formula Renault or whatever, straight into Formula One. But on the other hand, if you bring in regulations, somebody might say that you're suppressing natural talent and so on. I'm uncertain what the right thing to do is. I was the one who was against giving Raikkonen a super licence, but that was simply on the grounds that we had a regulation, we have an exceptional circumstances clause, there were no exceptional circumstances, therefore why give him a licence? But the other 24 people on the Formula One Commission all wanted to give him one and we're a democracy…We've made Formula 3000 much much cheaper by making it a single engine, single make, single everything, but it's still quite expensive to do. It is one of the problems that we are going to have to deal with. I don't pretend to have an immediate solution.

Q: Someone has said this week that it isn't promoted well enough?

Max Mosley: The trouble is that they say this about all forms of motor sport. You could go to the Caterham Seven class and you will find someone who will say 'we ought to have more television coverage.' If you did that, you would have nothing on television all day long except motor sport…You see, the fact that it's at a Grand Prix means that there is television, even if it's not live. You can put it on television, it costs very little to originate it because all the equipment is in place, but what you cannot do is make the public watch.

Q: You did a bit of 180 degree on tobacco. You said you wouldn't interfere with it and now you have put a deadline on it. Some people feel that that's wrong, that it's a legal product and should be allowed to be advertised.

Max Mosley: My personal view remains… We asked for and did not get evidence that there's a link between sponsorship in Formula One and people taking up smoking, which is what we're really talking about. But there is a general worldwide movement against tobacco and although I don't think it will actually make any difference to the number of people who smoke, or any of those issues â€" that's my personal view â€" the fact remains that the trend is against.

If you were to allow Formula One to go on with tobacco advertising, two things would happen. You would gradually restrict the number of countries in which you can have a Grand Prix and secondly, you would tend to push Formula One into a kind of side road of sponsorship and you might well find that general sports sponsorship overtook you. You were stuck there with tobacco, completely in their hands, and even though the money was going up everywhere else, you couldn't introduce any of that into Formula One because none of them would come in because you've got tobacco. So you have a double risk: cutting down the countries, losing out on sponsorship.

It seemed to me that the right course was to try to get out of tobacco and bring Formula One back into the mainstream of sports sponsorship. Now 2006, we actually chose that date because it was the original EU Commission date. Strictly speaking, you could argue that we couldn't do it for another year because of the Concorde Agreement but nobody has raised that point. It seems to be working out quite well and I think that what we're going to see now is, over the next four or five years, we're going to see one team after another moving off tobacco. We're going to see that.

Q: Ron Dennis has suggested that there are loopholes in technical regulations; are you bracing yourself for further problems here?

Max Mosley: He's always saying that. He was one of the ones telling everybody that we couldn't check traction control, and in the end, such a body of opinion built up saying that we couldn't check traction control that we felt bound to let it in and then the quid pro quo was getting rid of electronics in other parts.

Well, once traction control and launch control and all these technologies became legal whose cars were sitting on the grid? Ron Dennis's, because the systems having become legal, he wasn't able to make them work, and it does lead us to believe that he would also not have been able to make a secret system, which we couldn't detect, that worked.

And it also makes us think that if he has the biggest electronics department of any team in Formula One, probably nobody else could either. Probably all that proved was that the whole of that business about we couldn't check the traction control was rubbish and a smokescreen. Dear old Ron, to his dying day, when he's long retired and in his bathchair, will still be saying people are bending the rules. When he says this, we say to him 'tell us what?' and he can't. Then he says the problem is that the rules are not clear. The rules are clear, they are alright for everybody.

We then say to him 'Ron, tell you what, you and your very expensive lawyers, write a set of specific clear rules and we'll have a look at them.' That was seven years ago and I'm still waiting. I'm very fond of Ron, but I don't take too much notice of him any more. The question was: are people bending the rules? No, we do not believe they are and we are checking very carefully and there are certain controversial things being discussed for Melbourne at this very moment, things we know about, but the only thing we think is illegal, we have told the people concerned it's illegal and I hope they won't turn up with it in Melbourne.

Q: Can you tell us what it is?

Max Mosley: There is supposed to be a new tyre, with asymmetric grooves which is not allowed. The grooves have to be uniform, which we think means they have to be same whichever way you look at them. Some people think that if one of the shoulders slopes more than the other it will be alright and we don't think it will. That's just one example of thousands of things. I probably should never have mentioned it.

Q: You've got three weeks to sort it out…

Max Mosley: Well you see, what happens is that generally speaking a team has a new development or whatever, they have a new twin clutch gearbox, let's say. We will ask them to give us details and we will give them an opinion. If they disagree with our opinion, there is nothing to stop them making their gearbox and turning up at a race with it. If they turn up at a race with it and it's illegal, then they can't run it. So we give them an opinion and they usually follow it. Since we started that system, there have been about five hundred enquiries. I think we got two of them wrong. One of them was the famous McLaren differential and I can't remember what the other one was. On the whole we get it right, but it is an opinion.

Q: Could you not just say 'no' to things?

Max Mosley: We could do, but it would mean changing the sporting code and if the teams wanted us to do that, we would do it, but at the moment the way it works is that Charlie gives his opinion and then it goes through the classic system which is the stewards and the court of appeal, which they have every right to pursue. But generally speaking people don't try it.

Q: I thought that there was controversy going on about gearbox systems?

Max Mosley: There's a little bit of controversy about twin clutch gearboxes. Cars these days have seven forward gears, and obviously the more forward gears you are allowed, the narrower the torque band for the engine can be and therefore the greater the power â€" you can have a really peaky engine â€" particularly now it's all done by computer. You couldn't have a seven speed box if you had to do it manually. But they can't have more than seven speeds so if you then narrow this right down, what you really need is CVT. Now that's illegal, but maybe if you have seven gears… with these twin plates clutches, what happens is that one set of gears is engaged while the other one is driving the car, so the gearchange becomes almost instant. You just swap clutches, instead of having to engage different gears.

Now you could arrange it that the clutches worked in such a way that on that particularly awkward corner where fifth was too short and sixth was too long, it just got you over that little bit. It would generate a bit of heat and so on, but it would just get you over that bit. I've explained that very badly and crudely, but you can see the essence of it. Well, we make it clear that you can't do that and of course we will be looking at the software to see that it doesn't do it. But that's in essence, as I understand it, the danger with the twin clutch system. I think there is more than one team that have these and they've existed for a long time. If they are just used as a means of speeding up the gearchange, it is unobjectionable. It's only if it is used to expand the range of the gearbox.

Q: This is not clear, something about a previous stance by MM about his philosophy of a driver's skill

Max Mosley: To me, there still remain three big areas of skill: steering the car, braking the car and using the accelerator. In a Formula One car, using the accelerator is extremely tricky. Obviously in a road-going Fiat Panda it's less of an issue. And it is a pity and it's a pity that the gearboxes are fully automatic in a way, but then the other side of that is, suppose we went to the opposite extreme and we said we will allow total electronic control of everything, including the steering, the brakes, the lot? Would the best drivers still be winning the races? And the answer, I think is that he would.

And in a way that's what it's all about because, what traction control or current electronics do is they enable me or Niki Lauda to drive the car, where previously that would have been difficult, but when you get to the difference between Verstappen and Frentzen… what's the difference, if any, between Coulthard and Schumacher? We would find it very hard to define, but you've got your computer programmer sitting there, how's he going to programme that difference into whatever system you've got? I don't think he can. Certainly the top drivers seem to think â€" and Schumacher certainly thinks â€" even if you had a totally electronic car, he would still have an edge, if he had an edge at all. It's still a pity.

Q: It's still a shame that a driver isn't penalized for missing a gear, for instance.

Max Mosley: It's absolutely true. The old fashioned Hewland with clutch and gearbox provided opportunities for overtaking. The downside, of course, is that it blew up engines, particularly on the down change. But the reason that they originally talked us into the semi-automatic gearchange was you can avoid overrevving on the upchange because you just have a rev limiter. But on the downchange, if somebody engages a gear that is too low too soon, it pushes the engine right round beyond its limits. And so we said, OK to semi-automatic. But now of course, the technology exists that you could have a completely ordinary gearchange and still have a device that disengaged the clutch if you did what we've just mentioned. But it's too late now, you can't go back. A pity.

Q: Yet it allows the young drivers to come in and drive a Formula One car very well…

Max Mosley: Well the other side of that is that all the formulae they come through and in which they are successful all have manual gearchanges, including Formula 3000, Formula Renault, all these things, so the chances are, if you had those sort of gearchanges, they would do it just as well if not better. The trouble is now that so much is understood about the cars that even the worst car today isn't that difficult to drive if you're that level of racing driver. It's a little bit like road cars. There are fewer and fewer really bad road cars.

Q: The absolutely last priority for teams is drivers. They are almost immaterial…

Max Mosley: Absolutely right. The other side of that is that, if we ever achieved our dream of having regulations that, no matter how much money you spend, you don't get any advantage, so it's much fairer, all the money would go to the drivers, because that would be the only way…

Q: Niki Lauda said that driving grooved tyres on the limit was much harder than the tyres in his day.

Max Mosley: He explained all that to me on the basis that therefore we shouldn't have grooved tyres, and I was mentally picturing more grooves and more grooves! Grooved tyres may be a bit controversial this year when they start wearing but they did achieve their objective, they did keep speeds under control for a long time. We had that big leap in speed last year with the tyre war but actually if you go back to the start of my presidency, go back to '92, when they had big slicks, the full automatic suspension and all the rest of it, and you look at Mansell's time around Magny Cours, which I think was only broken last year by a tenth or two, but only a few tenths in ten years, so we did succeed to some extent.

Do you remember when we went from 18 inch slicks at the rear to 15 inch? Patrese said that it was going to kill all the drivers but now we have 15 inches with bloody great grooves in them. In the end, there are problems now. By not changing the bodywork, everybody is iterating down onto little tiny things, and they are working 24 hours a day in the wind tunnel on some tiny advantage, and also they are taking liberties, like those, what they call brake ducts. They are super sophisticated aerodynamic devices which have a knock-on effect; it's all tuned, you know, the turning vane, the so-called brake duct, the underneath, the this, the that. They are all massively important but unfortunately I can't think of any way to attack them. I would if I could.

All the things you do with the aerodynamics they can negate. What they can't do is, if you put the thing on bicycle tyres and give it 10,000 horsepower, you can't get the power on the road. I can't see us giving up the grooves in the near future.

Q: All this money, all these developments, and the public still doesn't get much of a show, how do you get around that? There's no denying that!

Max Mosley: Well, I'm now about to deny it. The thing is that you've got a huge television audience. There are two views to this. At the moment, you do get overtaking on occasions, but you don't get much because most people don't want to take the risk. If they are at the back of the grid, they will do it to come through thefield, but once they are in the points, it's generally speaking not worth risking a collision for the sake of a point unless it's special circumstances. But the overtaking is a whole manoeuvre now.

You get two people, one in front of the other. One of them goes into the pits, the other goes like hell to try and make up time. This one comes out of the pits, he goes like hell. He goes into the pits and then there's a complete drama about which one's going to be first when he come out of the pits. The whole process takes about 15 minutes. It's intensely exciting. To me that is a real drama of the race. You're waiting, provided they don't screw up the television shot which they often do, for the shot down the pit straight. There's one man in the pits as the other one comes around the corner, who's going to get there first? It's really really exciting, at least it is to me.

You have the whole thing about did he pull in at the right moment? Did they put in the right amount of fuel? Was it right just to put in a bit of fuel so that he can do another one but he came out in front? All those questions, compared to let's say Monza 1971 where there were 114 overtaking manoeuvres which was completely boring and the only interesting question there was who comes out of the Parabolica second on the last lap because he was the one who traditionally won the race because he had a little bit of a slipstream. It's not a thing you can discuss really, because all the racers say overtaking is everything, but if that's true, why isn't oval racing a mega-world show, because they overtake constantly, television is available, anybody who wants to buy CART or IRL can do so. But they've got no audience.

Formula One, with all its drama, has an audience. I think we've got it about right. But why does nobody watch CART? It's great, it's fantastic, but it doesn't grip a worldwide audience of non-racing enthusiasts. That's the secret. This is the problem that rally has got. It's one thing to present rallies so that the rally enthusiast sees it well on the television and thinks it's fantastic, but the challenge is to grab an audience that doesn't even know what a rally is. Where Formula One has succeeded is that it has grabbed an audience worldwide who ten years ago, certainly 15 ago, didn't know what motor sport was, witness the fact that total television receipts in the mid-eighties for everybody, was of the order of between one and two million dollars and now we've got all this Kirch-Murdoch and all the rest of it. That's a measure of the popularity.

I think the fundamental error that we all tend to make is that we are basically racers and we judge it by our standards but the world that pays for Formula One now, which is the big wide world, they are not racers. All sport is available to them, they can chose football, horse racing, show jumping, skiing whatever they want.

Q: But surely if you just have one or two overtaking manoeuvres, like Schumacher and Montoya at Brazil last year…if there was a hundred overtaking manoeuvres, people wouldn't remember them.

Max Mosley: I agree with that. It's like an amazing goal in football, like Beckham… That was a drama, because first of all he had the balls to do it himself, and secondly he did actually score. I'm not a Beckham â€" Posh fan, but it was a spectacular thing to do. As you say, you talk about it. The famous overtaking at Spa when they went either side of Zonta, that was an amazing thing to see.

Q: But it's much more exciting to see cars racing, if you don't want that, why not have them starting five minutes apart like rallying?

Max Mosley: I'm not saying that one car behind another, racing, is not exciting, because it is, but there's nothing particularly magic about the actual overtaking manoeuvre. Very often, one catches the other and the one behind is significantly quicker. The one in front has a bit of a problem towards the end of the race. You're always wondering all the time if maybe if one might slip inside the other and then you've got the drama of the pit stop and who gets in and who gets out. It is the fact of them being together creates the whole thing. I think that is the weakness of rallying. They are going to have to rely on other things, like artificially running the cars together, and of course letting you drive the car down the stage, which is coming. You're going to be in the rally before long. In the end, you will have Virtual Formula One, you will have the whole thing computer-generated.

Q: Did you help with the Melbourne Coroners' inquiry?

Max Mosley: We've had a certain amount of correspondence. The trouble was that he himself (the Coroner) didn't deign to make any sort of contact. It was all done by a traffic policeman, quite a junior one, a sergeant in the Melbourne traffic police, whose start-off point was to write to everybody famous so anybody he had heard of, people like Jackie Stewart… He didn't seem to understand that this has become a massively scientific business, with university departments and the transport research laboratory and all these people working on it, a bit boring to begin with but in the end…The policeman wanted various information. Officially he was a policeman writing on behalf of the coroner to seek their view or something.

The problem is that watching a Grand Prix is at least one, if not two orders of magnitude safer than driving to the circuit and away from it if you are, say, 50 kilometers away, just on ordinary figures. I would like to see greater spectator safety and safety for everybody, but the fact of the matter is, if you go and watch a Grand Prix anywhere in the world, the dangerous bit is driving to the circuit and coming away again.

Q: Max, what's the current thinking about increasing the World Rally championship?

Max Mosley: The number of rounds? There hasn't been much discussed lately, and whenever it is discussed, there's a certain amount of resistance from the teams. They really don't want any more and I think the next step may be to change one or two of the events rather than the number.

Q: Well we did that, we chopped Portugal and brought in Germany. How do you see that?

Max Mosley: I think the German event will be a very good one. It's a pity about Portugal but that business with the stage where you couldn't have got an ambulance in was just indefensible. But the next time we put a new one on the calendar it really needs to be outside Europe. There are still too many in Europe. But again, it's very difficult. The more successful the championship becomes, the harder it is going to be to cancel rounds.

Max Mosley: It depends which ones. If it's a question of whether to sell it to Channel 4 or Channel 3, that's ISC. If it's a question of whether to run the British rally in November or to move it, that would be us, or to run a new event would be us. They've got very little say in that sort of thing.

Q: Is Mr Richards the media chief in the World Rally championship, as is quoted in Motorsport News this week?

Max Mosley: He's the media chief in the sense that we have sold to him, or he has got the commercial rights to the World Rally championship for a period of ten years, so subject to certain constraints, he can do what he wants to with television. He can propose a calendar, but in the end it's the commission and then the World Council that decides.

Q: Where does the power really lie?

Max Mosley: At the moment with us. Now when we do the 100 year deal, we may give him more power, we may give him, for example, power over the calendar, analogous to that which Bernie has in Formula One. And what Bernie has in Formula One is the right to propose the calendar, largely the right to fix the calendar, subject to certain constraints. For example, the one that he can't cancel a classic event without our consent, if they are prepared to normal the money, like anybody else. So we may well give David Richards that, but that hasn't happened yet.

Q: Did the powers that be do enough to help Alain Prost?

Max Mosley: I think he got a lot of help from the only source that could help him, for example Bernie. I think he had money… I don't know, but I suspect he had money in advance, things like that. But there's nothing we can do and the French government â€" I don't know how much help he got in France.

Q: How likely is that we will see 12 teams on the grid next year?

Max Mosley: Unlikely, because a lot of people have been enquiring about entering, but of course we have that rule now that you can enter and you could secure that place today, but you have to give us $48 mil which then comes back with interest over the period. That tends to eliminate the non-serious people. Otherwise there would be two or three entries now. I could name three groups that all say they want to do it, but we just say 'terrific, whoever gets the 48 mil here first has got the…

Q: Presumably if Bill Ford has a re-emergence of his green philosophies, Jaguar might disappear anyway?

Max Mosley: This is the weakness of the whole that manufacturers' championship, that it's not a core business to any of the manufacturers. As Leo Kirch himself says, any of us might be dead in seven years time, including him, but the only certainty is that none of the people currently be running the big companies will still be doing so in seven years time.

Q: What's the state of play of the Concorde Agreement for rallies?

Max Mosley: There's a certain amount of talk about it and there ought to be one, but nobody has started drafting one. If they have, they haven't told us. The first thing you need to do to do one is to get hold of the Formula One Concorde Agreement and follow the pattern. I think that's what they need to do with the regulations: get hold of the Formula One regulations.

Q: What sort of sense of weakness to do the teams feel that they need to have such an agreement? What is it going to do to strengthen them?

Max Mosley: What the Formula One teams have in the Concorde Agreement is the guarantee that certain things won't change in the regulations without their consent. I suppose that strictly speaking, at the moment, we could change say two litres whatever it is with the restrictor and make it one litre and no restrictor, certainly in 2004 and arguably in 2003, or we could say it's two wheel drive â€" whatever.

You can't do that in Formula One. Regulation stability is one factor. The quid pro quo is they then have to sign up for several years because at the moment, we don't have any means of ensuring that any of the rally teams will turn up in 2003.

Q: Mitsubishi have said that they will stay in the championship for three years on account of certain agreements with the FIA. Have any other teams made assurances in that way?

Max Mosley: Not that I know of. Anyway, with assurances, what happens is the big manufacturers turn up and say 'I'm really sorry…my predecessor…I can't maintain this.' Even if you've got a contract. All they do is give you a cheque. That happened with ITC. When we changed the DTM into ITC, we did so on the basis of commitment of three big manufacturers and in the end we made them commit for $8m. We ended up picking up $5.3m from two of them. It's a completely different thing with the small teams. If Prost goes out of business, what can you do? But at least you know he won't stop doing Formula One unless he goes out of business, he won't just stop because the accountants don't like it.

Q: On Justin Wilson?

Max Mosley: We can't make the Formula One teams take or even try someone like Justin Wilson. One suspects that if they gave him a trial he would be very quick and he would probably be quicker than some of the existing Formula One drivers, but I suppose it's inconvenient because he's 6ft 3in and they just can't be bothered.

I think it's a great pity. Actually Formula 3000 last year was very competitive, and to win as he did, he did all the things you needed to do: he didn't go off the road, he won the races, sometimes very close races, and he's obviously a very very good driver.

Q: What about scrapping Fridays at Grands Prix?

Max Mosley: That seems to me to be completely sensible. The rational thing to do is not to run on Friday. You run on Saturday and Sunday, keeping the existing time-table. You are allowed one engine. If it blows up in the race, you're history anyway. If it blows up before the race, that's OK, but you start at the back or in the middle of the grid.

And then we need to review the question of how many teams each engine supplier supplies because you can't go on having a situation where the small teams haven't got an engine, or worse than that, have got an engine which is manifestly uncompetitive. We just need to get an agreement. If they don't agree, they don't agree, we can't force them, but if the majority of the teams agree, we can do it.

Q: Indistinct(start of tape), but about the Citroen penalty in Monte Carlo rally?

Max Mosley: The answer is that the stewards decided, for whatever reason, that the penalty should be suspensive, as they call it, and the moment that you do that, it's as if you haven't applied it. They didn't give a reason why. The whole question of suspending is something we're going to look at with the World Council. You've got two separate points. Should it be suspended for example, something like exclusion where you can't put the man back if he wins the appeal, and then should you suspend if you easily can put him back?

Obviously, if you can easily readjust the result, like two minutes, there's no need to suspend the penalty. Somewhere like Australia there might be an argument for suspending it, because you might alter where he ran on the road and that might improve or diminish his chances, as the case may be. Or maybe you could say that he can't put it back. But there is an argument for saying even where you can't put things right afterwards, you should still not suspend it. If you think of football, when somebody gets a red card, it would be absurd for him to say 'well I'm not going to leave the pitch because my manager's appealing, I'm going to go on playing.' The whole thing would break down. It's a fairly big discussion.

But as far as Monaco is concerned, I don't know why they suspended it. Had he been excluded there would have been a case for suspending it.

Q: You've spoken about draconian penalties for people who do illegal servicing. Two minutes is draconian?

Max Mosley: There are two possibilities. One is that they were changing the wheels because they had something that they wished to conceal which was illegal. The other is they were changing them so that the car would look nicer in the parc ferme, which seems to be the generally accepted explanation. Any suspicion that they were doing something illegal, they should have been excluded.

If it was purely stupidy, because they had forgotten to tell the mechanics and the mechanics, having washed the car, wanted to take the dirty wheels off and put the cleans ones on, so it looked nice in parc ferme, that really was what happened, then you could argue there should be a fine. And maybe because they had been told not to do it specifically, there should be a big fine.

But it seems to me it's one or the other. It should either be exclusion if there is a real illegal service, or if it was just a very simple mistake which has no bearing on the outcome of the event, then it's different. I don't know, but I suspect the view of the stewards that this wasn't illegal servicing properly.

Q: We've had some horrendous businesses, $300,000 for Goodyear and Toyota, we've had Tommi Makinen excluded from the Safari Rally, each in cases when it was arguable whether it was illegal or not and certainly there had no been precedents. Here, these guys had been told not to do it, and they go and do it, and this happens.

Max Mosley: Tommi Makinen, in Kenya, if he did get illegal assistance which arguably he did, it certainly made a difference to the outcome of the event. The argument for what happened in Monaco was that it had no conceivable bearing on the event or the outcome. Absolutely nothing to do with servicing properly, so-called.

Q: Right, but it did have a major impact on what came next which was the promotional value of what happened on the rally.

Max Mosley: You're confusing two separate issues: you're confusing whether they did an illegal service and if so what the penalty should be, and then, if you get the penalty wrong, then that obviously did have an effect, but that says nothing as to the draconian-ness or not of the penalty. It was either the right penalty or the wrong penalty. There is an argument for saying it was the wrong penalty and there is an argument for saying it shouldn't have been suspended. But it's completely different from somebody actually doing something during an event that can have a bearing on the outcome of the event. Unless they were doing it to conceal something illegitimate and there's no evidence to suggest they were.

Q: Going back to the Citroen business and how they advertised their victory in Monte Carlo which in fact, they never did win. What is the FIA's position about that?

Max Mosley: Technically, that is a breach of article 131 which is the false advertising article, that's sporting code. I think it's 131. So then we had to decide are we going to have them in front of the World Council or not. A very full explanation has come from Citroen as to how it happened which does actually sound realistic. In essence, they had prepared three different advertisements for three different cases and somebody took the decision to put the thing in while Frequelin was in the plane and it was one of those complete confusions.

It seems to me that probably the fair thing to do is, having regard to all the circumstances, it probably doesn't warrant dragging them in front of the World Council, because I think the World Council would listen to it all and say, 'well in all the circumstances, we can understand that and don't do it again.' I don't believe it was deliberate. If I thought for one moment it was deliberate then it would be a nice money-making opportunity but I don't think it is.

Q: What about appeals generally? Are there too many?

Max Mosley: I believe there are. The trouble is now that Formula One and rallies have become such big business that they almost appeal as a matter of course, and what I would like to do is change the way we do things. Let's take Formula One, because it's simpler. You have the local clerk of the course, you have our race director, Charlie Whiting. I would like him to impose the penalty and then the team to appeal to the stewards if they are not happen with the penalty, and then there's a proper hearing with both sides and then only appeal to the Court of Appeal with leave, either leave of the stewards, or leave of the Court of Appeal if the stewards refuse. That would cut down the number of appeals, there are too many appeals now.

Q: How would you like the timescale work out, on Sunday nights?

Max Mosley: If you did what I've just said, the thing would all be over on Sunday and that would be the end of it, and if the stewards refuse leave to appeal, their chance of getting it from the Court of Appeal, under that system, they would have to show that they have an arguable point of interpretation of the regulations. The chance of it not being all over on Sunday night would be minimal.

In Formula One, the teams don't like the idea. They are so conservative, it's very difficult to get them to move. In rallies, it would be a very big change because there isn't currently an event director or equivalent to the race director and his relationship with the clerk of the course is to be defined. It's not like Formula One and go out and know exactly how the circuit goes. You're not going to get somebody flying in from another country who knows the entire terrain. So it needs development, but the principal of getting it all done on Sunday night except when there's something really usual. And also we've going to be a little bit careful about the stewards and how they work.

Plus, I've now discovered that in rallies, there are quite a few things that have been going on for years that are contrary to the sporting code. For example, using bulletins other than for safety matters. Having the stewards in certain circumstances in an executive role. The clerk of the course, taking decisions to penalize people which he has no power to do under the code. These customs have grown up in rallying and they are just not correct. It's all got to be looked at. Otherwise somebody will appeal and we will look stupid in our own Court of Appeal.

If you're going to be a steward on a World Championship event, rally or racing you've got stay on Sunday night. We've had one or two cases in rallying where there's been a suspicion in quite the detail they would have heard it had there not been a plane to catch, so the best thing to say is 'no plane.'

Q: You've taken a very large sum of money off Mr Kirch, and you're spending it on automobile safety. That money came from motor racing, and there is an argument that at least some of it should be spent on the sport and not on your particular plots and projects.

Max Mosley: Absolutely right and some of it is being spent on the sport. Aerodynamic research is discovering why Alboreto's sports car flipped when it got side ways and what we can do to stop it. We've already done research into why the three Mercedes flipped at Le Mans. We're paying part of it and the manufacturers are paying some of it.

There is a very very high tech system being proposed for wheel tethers. It's extremely expensive to develop and we're going 50-50 with a motor manufacturer on the costs, because there's no rope known to man which will keep the wheels on in the worst case, even in not so bad cases. The crash helmet will eventually have an impact on the roads but not in cars, only in motorcycles, we're doing that. Research into improving safety on circuits and crash barriers. There are racing circuits all over the world which have to spend millions and millions of dollars. You couldn't even do one circuit with the money we've got, even though what we've got is more than the road safety budget of the EU it would hardly scratch the surface just at Silverstone.

Q: Is the FIA as going to be as hard on Spa as they have been on Silverstone?

Max Mosley: If necessary yes. Spa have already made same efforts. There is a new dual carriageway, things of that kind. Hockenheim are making efforts. The thing that was worrying about Silverstone was that nobody appeared to care, and when there was some money, it was spent on a luxurious clubhouse for the 600 BRDC members. If you own the premises, you would expect them to think about the guests first and themselves last.

Q: What about Interlagos?

Max Mosley: Well, everybody says it's not very good. I have to confess that the last time I went to Brazil was in '82 and that was Rio so I can't claim to be up-to-date. The biggest problem is that we don't have another South American race. We're a little bit in difficulty that if we cancelled Brazil, that's it, that's South America right off the World Championship calendar which is a great traditional place, so there's a reluctance, but a point is coming where if they don't do something, that's it. It is a reason for keeping a race.

It's as if Silverstone was the only one in Western Europe and we couldn't get one anywhere else. Whereas in Western Europe, we've got too many already, being brutal about it, and we need to free up a few races. So if people don't want to take it seriously…You have to weigh up how much we are willing to tolerate Interlagos versus the importance of having at least one event in South America. If South America went, it would probably have an effect on the whole of South America in a way. Things change. Suddenly there's Montoya coming up. We're always saying we want to be more of a World Championship.

Q: Can you explain the background with the Safari rally? The chairman has said that it should be a partnership and backers should include the FIA? To what extent should the FIA put its hand in its pocket and make a rally like the Safari happen?

Max Mosley: Absolutely not. It's not our job. We are a regulator and in fact the deal with the European Commission is that we are not involved in the commercial side in anyway. He (the chairman) doesn't understand the basic structures. And if people don't have the means to put on a safe, properly-run World Championship event.

It's very difficult to justify. Imagine, if there were a traffic accident, you would have to explain to the world's media why there was traffic going the other way on a stage. It would be really really difficult to explain that. Most people wouldn't understand.

Q: Does the FIA have the ability or power to demand a financial bond or something from a rally organiser to make sure it doesn't go broke?

Max Mosley: No, no we don't. On the other hand they have to put sufficient things in place, so that if thing is going to completely take a dive you will probably know before you went there. But no, they don't put bonds up. If we were seriously worried, we might ask them as a condition to going on the calendar. We couldn't really do that to a traditional event.

Q: How long is it before we hear that the rally in fact won't happen?

Max Mosley: I don't know that it won't. The last I heard was that the government were getting involved in various ways. The two main problems are the traffic and open roads, and the other problem is the animals. Even if you closed the road, you've probably got to have a helicopter for safety.

Q: Generally speaking, has the ban on testing been a bad thing, because Formula One has slipped off the tabloid consciousness, to a greater extent more than it ever has before?

Max Mosley: I don't know whether that's true. First of all, there isn't a ban on testing, there's sort of like a holiday, November and December and then it's back on in January. All we've done, or I've done, is say 'you should police that yourselves and shouldn't involve the FIA the discussion about testing.' The teams wanted us to continue to take charge of it and we said we wouldn't. Imagine the moment people don't want to observe the spirit of it. Suppose Ferrari had taken their new engine and gearbox and stuck it in sports car, tested it through November and December. Is that Formula One testing? I just didn't want to get involved in the argument, so I'm saying now 'we're in charge from Thursday afternoon until Sunday night and what you do in between is up to you.'

It's a gentleman's agreement between the teams. It's an optimistic term.

Q: How important is it for Formula One that Ferrari doesn't run away with this season?

Max Mosley: It would be helpful if they didn't run away. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion. If you think about 2001, if the McLarens and Williamses had been as reliable as the Ferraris, it would have been much harder. Ferrari would still have won but it would have been much more difficult. Trouble is the new car looks so incredibly quick, but let's wait and see. It's a very revolutionary car. They are taking a big chance.

Q: Where do you rate Michael in the all-time greats?

Max Mosley: He's certainly 'one of', if not 'The.' He's probably the best. He's so all-round. With all the others, there's a weakness here or a weakness there. It's very difficult to see what his weakness is. I don't know about Fangio because I didn't know him. By the time I met him he was sort of old. All the others, with every single one you can find something about them there's a weakness, and yet with Schumacher, I don't know what it is. You sit down and talk to him, for example he doesn't know much about motor racing history.

I was once very shocked that he'd never heard of Jochen Rindt, for example, but if you talk to him about anything that is relevant to what he does, it's like talking to a very clever graduate about his subject. He's completely analytical, he never says something stupid, he never misses the point, understands everything you say immediately and if you didn't know that he's fairly narrow, you would consider him to be intellectually formidable and insofar as he's got information, he is intellectually formidable. He doesn't have any apparent emotional weaknesses.

The only time I've seen him behave a little bit irrationally was at Monza because of the September 11th and they all got a bit… but he was by no means the only one. It was a general thing. But it's really very hard to see weaknesses in Michael's make-up.

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- The Autosport.com Team

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