After five terms as FIA president, Max Mosley will step down this year. He spoke to Eric Thompson exclusively from Monaco about his 40-year involvement in motor racing.
After 40 years' in motor sport, the last 16 as president of the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), Max Mosley, along with his great mate, Bernie Ecclestone, has made motor racing the global sport it is today. For better or worse, they have turned what was generally regarded as a gentleman's sport into the money-making behemoth it is now.
In October, Mosley will stand down.
Most people tend to think the FIA and Mosley are intrinsically linked, but his introduction to the sport of motor racing was anything but planned.
"The motor racing thing all started when my wife and I were given tickets to go to Silverstone. Until then, I had never seen a motor race," said Mosley. "I was hooked as soon as I saw it.
"It was a race with people like Sterling Moss, Bruce McLaren, Jack Brabham and all the other names of that era. But it was the Formula Junior race before the main race that I thought I'd like to do. It took me a few years to get the money together to have a go and that's what started it all - an instant fascination at having seen it.
"Probably, if I hadn't seen that race I probably wouldn't have got involved, but that's how things are."
After a couple of big shunts while racing, and realising he would never be world champion, Mosley retired from the actual racing side of things and joined forces with Robin Heard, Alan Rees and Graham Coaker to form MARCH Engineering (the M stands for Mosley).
"When we had the MARCH team back in 1970, I said [motor racing] was very disorganised at the time and I remember that when the teams used to negotiate with the organisers about prize money and all that, they would all go together because they didn't trust each other. They took me along at the beginning because I was a lawyer and they thought that might be useful.
"I couldn't believe that a world sport was run on that sort of basis but that's how it was in those days. Then a year later, Bernie [Ecclestone] came along and then the two of us were appointed to represent all of the teams.
"That went on all through the 70s and you sort of get sucked in and get more and more involved and it sort of almost gets unavoidable. And then, one way or another, I've been involved ever since."
By the early 80s, Mosley had had his fill and took some time out from the sport. However, he couldn't resist the temptation to get back into the governance of motor racing and accepted the chairmanship of the manufacturers' arm of the FIA, then known as the Federation of International Sport Automobile (FISA).
"After awhile, I got fed up of doing [FISA] because I could never get to talk to the person who was president at the time, Jean Marie Balestre, so in the end I thought I'm going to stop doing this. But then I thought if I'm going to stop doing it, I may as well stand against him in the 1991 election, because nothing could be lost as I was going to quit anyway. And as it was, I won.
"I wanted to stop in '05 ... and, although I resigned, I was prevailed upon to keep going because there was no one at the time to do [the FIA presidency] but that's now no longer the case." (Mosley has thrown his support behind ex-director of Scuderia Ferrari, Jean Todt.)
Mosley's last year in power has been dogged with the issue of the spiralling cost of racing in these economic climes. His rationale of wanting to reduce the annual budget for teams has been at odds with some of the bigger players in the sport.
"We haven't driven the cost down as much as we would have liked to due to the resistance of the existing teams. But you can understand that. If you're a big, rich team, you've got an advantage over a small, poor team so you don't want the money you can spend pushed down to the point where several teams can compete with you. But that's going to be the way it's going to be in the end.
"The car industry cannot afford to keep pumping this sort of money in any longer because they're making economies in their core business. Even to the extent of not serving coffee at meetings or only using one lift in the building.
"When you're doing that in the main company, you're not going to keep pumping money into Formula One much longer. At the moment, the main boards and the CEOs of these companies have simply not had the time to focus on Formula One ... but eventually they'll get around to it and, when they do, we'll see action the likes of Honda and BMW have already taken or drastic cost cutting.
"What I'm trying to do is to get our people to cut the cost before the main board [manufacturers] turn a searchlight on F1 and say 'that's absurd what you're spending'. I don't want to wait until the blow falls. I've always found it difficult to get people to think outside the Formula One paddock and see the bigger picture."
We can't forget that as president of the FIA, Mosley's job is not just overseeing Formula One, but global motor sport in general as well as liaising with worldwide motoring organisations. However, as F1 is the blue riband of motor racing, one would hazard a guess it takes up most of Mosley's time.
"As a general rule, it wasn't really that much. It's the bit that everybody sees ... really, an awful lot of the FIA's work is to do with road cars, road safety and environmental questions. Unfortunately that doesn't really grip the public and what gets written about and read about is Formula One.
"I should think as a percentage of the actual work and time taken, it's relatively small. Clearly, the impression to the outside world is that's all we [F1] do."
After 16 years in charge of the FIA, Mosley has managed to change a vast number of things in the sport, some contentious and some revolutionary. However, he admits he hasn't managed to get everything done he wanted to.
"It's absolutely clear to me that if we could get our national sporting authorities in different countries all over the world to foster karting energetically, we would then get a new generation of drivers emerging.
"It would take five plus years but any country that gets the grass roots of competition racing and rallying going is going to produce a world-level driver."
Through all the contentious ups and down during his tenure at the helm of the FIA, including intrusions into his private life and the unfortunate death of his son, Mosley still retains his enthusiasm for motor sport. On stepping down from the presidency, he's not abandoning the sport. After a bit of a break, he'll be taking up a position on the FIA senate.
"First of all I'm going to take a rest and then I may consider writing a book. The prospect of not having to be in the office at nine and keep working until six every day solving other people's problems is quite alluring."
