From the Pulpit

FIA president Max Mosley says Formula One will be a single-tyre formula by 2008 - and Max Mosley usually gets what Max Mosley and Bernie Ecclestone want, so it will surely happen that way.

Indeed, Michelin has already announced that 2006 will be its last season in F1 (for now, at least), so that means that F1 will be a Bridgestone monopoly by 2007, right? Obvious, straightforward and simple, correct?

Well, over the Malaysian Grand Prix weekend Ron Dennis began hinting that 2006 might not be Michelin's last year in F1 after all. The French company was toying with the idea of trying to stay involved, he suggested.

Predictably, a clutch of F1 journalists reported Ron's remarks verbatim, without stopping to ask why he'd made them - in the wonderful world of F1, the 'why' is often more important than 'what'.

For if it were true - if, in other words, Ron truly believed that Michelin really was secretly planning to supply McLaren and others in 2007 - why would he reveal such a bombshell in what he would doubtless regard as "an inappropriate forum" (a favourite 'Ronspeak' buzz-phrase to describe press conferences)?

If Michelin really was planning to stay on, would Ron not be wiser to guard such red-hot information jealously, the better to woo his Bridgestone opposition into a false sense of security?

Michelin © LAT

After all, for a team like McLaren, who have had great success with Michelin and have therefore surely tailored their car(s) more sensitively than most to the particular characteristics of Michelin's distinctively square-shouldered rubber, switching to Bridgestone represents a daunting technical challenge - made more so by the undeniable fact that there's no love lost between the two companies, McLaren having peremptorily deserted Bridgestone for Michelin at the end of 2001.

Moreover, Ron would never, and I really do mean never, publicly blurt out such a bombshell by mistake. No, it would have been a strategic blurting - a leak, in other words - and I believe he made it for two reasons.

Over the past few weeks, Dennis had gradually become aware that the 'Kimi Raikkonen to Ferrari' rumours were more than just rumours, and that one of McLaren's most prized assets - for, even yet, undoubtedly that's what Kimi is - was about to go to the Woking team's bitterest rival.

Ron would also have found out that Kimi's biggest worry, which he had reportedly expressed only to an inner circle of friends and advisers, was that Ferrari's Bridgestone tyres weren't anything like as competitive as the Michelins he had grown used to at McLaren.

It's a common view. "If I were Kimi," Jacques Villeneuve remarked in the bar of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Sao Paulo last year, "I wouldn't want to join Ferrari until Michelin had left the sport. I wouldn't want that kind of [tyre] disadvantage. But by 2007 we'll probably all be on Bridgestones, so he'd have no problem."

No, Ron's remark was primarily intended to put a spanner in Kimi's Ferrari works - or, in other words, play on Kimi's insecurities by making him afraid that Michelin might stay on after all - the theory being that Kimi wouldn't want to saddle himself with Bridgestones until he was certain that Michelin was on the verge of exiting stage left.

But there was probably another bit of method in Ron's apparent madness, too. Not only was he trying to create a situation which might help to dissuade Kimi from leaving McLaren, but he was also sewing the seeds of an idea in the mind of Edouard Michelin.

Sometimes you can make something happen in F1 by suggesting it often enough, and Ron would have been hoping that his 'Michelin to stay on' leak might have spawned supporting comments from other Michelin team owners, the result of which would have been a paddock-swell of opinion culminating in a clamoured and insistent demand that Michelin stay on. So insistent, in fact, that the Clermont-Ferrand board would eventually have had to consider seriously.

And, if neither the first reason nor the second were to work out for him, Ron would have figured that he'd still have been no worse off. As such, it was a risk-free leak.

Meanwhile, Bernie Ecclestone was issuing his own risk-free leak - namely, the 'news' that Pirelli were considering making a return to F1 - and the very fact that Ecclestone felt the need to do so showed anyone who reads F1 politics closely that Ron's 'Michelin to stay on' remark was a flyer and no more.

Why was Ecclestone banging on about Pirelli? Because, facing a Michelin-free F1 from 2007 onwards, Bridgestone had doubtless begun to play monopolistic hardball with Bernie regarding money. Throw the spectre of Pirelli into the mix, and Bridgestone's hand was suddenly once again no stronger than it has been in this recent era of Bridgestone/Michelin duopoly.

Pirelli © LAT

(Why did Ecclestone choose Pirelli? Well, going right back to his Brabham days, Bernie has long had a cosy relationship with the Milanese tyre maker's most senior management and would easily have been able to persuade them to play ball with his little ruse.)

So don't expect to see Pirelli in F1 very soon - and don't expect Michelin to stay on, either.

Bridgestone book extensive trackside advertising at almost all Grands Prix - which earns Ecclestone a small fortune - while Michelin book almost none. Survival in F1 is all about playing the politics, you see, and playing the game.

Recently, Edouard Michelin has been playing it rather, er, injudiciously. "We have limited trust in the transparency of F1's ruling body [ie, the FIA]," he told pressmen last month - a remark that, so (comparatively) soon after having plunged F1 into disgrace by providing unsuitable tyres for Indianapolis last year and ruining the race thereby, would have utterly infuriated Mosley.

Meanwhile, senior Bridgestone marketing executives would have been signing-off an expensive global advertorial campaign which is now being run in many motoring- and motorsport-themed magazines worldwide, entitled 'Safety at heart'. ('Safety at heart' is an initiative of the FIA Foundation, which is the charitable arm of the FIA.)

Playing the game involves feathering Bernie's financial nest, of course, but also doing the right thing by the FIA, and keeping Max sweet. It also involves highlighting your own strengths in areas where your opposition is weakest.

Michelin's tyres, by their own admission, weren't safe enough to run at Indy last year - a marketing own-goal from which the company still hasn't recovered, particularly in the States. Hence 'Safety at heart' by Bridgestone. Ten out of ten for Japan; nul points for la France.

To sum-up, then, you should expect Kimi to drive for Ferrari in 2007, and Michelin to exit F1 at the end of this year. Sometimes things end up just as obvious, straightforward and simple as they appear at first look - they just have a circumambulatory way of getting there, that's all. But then F1 politics has never been a walk in the park...