Formula One and Beyond

by Max Mosley

  Except, that is, for the first race which was in Argentina and still not resolved. Bernie had done a deal on the telephone with César Carmen, president of the Argentinian club, which was intended to replace our original agreement with the organisers’ representative that the club had vetoed, with the result that the organisers quit in disgust. Bernie’s deal naturally upset Bordeo who, as president of their sporting committee, was still in Paris holding hands with Duffeler. There was a major row in the club that ended with the president Carmen saying to Bordeo: ‘All right, you get on with it!’ As a result, Bordeo was telling the press in Paris that there was no race, at least until 6 February, and no deal had been done. Bernie and I were saying all was well – the race would take place on 9 January as scheduled – and Duffeler was telling his loyal band of WCR supporters that the race would be postponed until 23 October to allow time to sort out the constructors.

  In the end, faced with our ultimatum of 9 January or no race, they all agreed: Bordeo, Carmen and who knows who else. Even the Argentinian ambassador appeared at one stage of the Paris meetings, and agreement was finally struck in the week before Christmas, with the first instalment of money following punctually on 24 December. But as we got ready to leave for Argentina, worrying news began to arrive of awkward practice times, agreed by the CSI and apparently designed with the sole purpose of annoying us. It looked as if we were in for trouble and I told Bernie we could expect to find Laughing Boy installed in Buenos Aires and ready for us. Bernie doubted this. ‘But if we do,’ he said, ‘We’ll let him do his worst in Argentina. Then we’ll put him in a radcon [the metal trunks in which we carried spare parts for the cars] and speak to him through the lid and explain things to him.’ At least that was something to look forward to.

  11

  BALESTRE TAKES OVER

  Apart from his work for the constructors as a whole, Bernie was still running his own team. At Brabham he had an outstanding designer in Gordon Murray, who came up with the idea of building a car that was sucked down by an enormous fan, creating a partial vacuum under it. This gave it vastly increased grip and when it appeared at the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix it literally ran rings round the opposition. It could easily overtake round the outside of Anderstorp’s long and relatively slow corners. Bernie’s team kept the fuel tanks full in qualifying to slow the car down and conceal the full extent of its advantage. But was it legal? Aerodynamic devices had to be fixed and immovable while the car was running.

  Bernie and Gordon claimed the fan was nothing to do with the car’s aerodynamics, but was just a more efficient way to cool the engine. After all, all road cars used fans and radiators. When we were alone, I asked Bernie about this. He said: ‘Yes, it’s just for cooling.’ Then he added conspiratorially, making a show of looking around to make sure he couldn’t be overheard: ‘Mind you, it does go down a few inches on its springs whenever you blip the throttle.’ Sailing close to the wind with the rules has always been part of Formula One and, after winning the Swedish Grand Prix with Niki Lauda at the wheel, Bernie voluntarily withdrew the car. Fighting the issue with the other teams would have weakened or even destroyed his position in FOCA.

  There was a multiple accident just after the start of the 1978 Italian Grand Prix. Bernie went to the scene, aided by police bodyguards who had been provided by the Italian authorities because of threats from the Red Brigades. Ronnie Peterson’s car had been damaged and caught fire. The marshals did an excellent job and he was not significantly burned, though he had other injuries including a broken leg, but they were not thought life-threatening. Early the next morning, however, Ronnie died in hospital from an embolism resulting from the leg fracture. It was so unnecessary and, for me, deeply depressing – he had been a real friend, who became yet another example of the tragic waste of young lives. Ronnie was extraordinarily talented and universally liked. In one of today’s cars, he would have been unhurt.

  Monza was always complicated and the following year Bernie and I had an incident with a policeman who stopped our car and had an argument with the driver. It seemed to me he was drunk and we could not work out what he was complaining about. We had almost arrived at the restaurant, so I said in my limited Italian I would go there on foot and ask them to send for a proper policeman. He took umbrage at this and wanted an argument, but nevertheless Bernie and I set out for the place 100 metres or so away. We ignored his demand to stop, whereupon he drew his gun and repeated his order, which we ignored again. He then cocked and fired his pistol. Bernie always says he heard the bullet whiz by, but I think the policeman fired in the air. Anyway, we still ignored him and continued into the restaurant where we asked the proprietor to call some more responsible police, who duly appeared. Among them was one of the police bodyguards from the year before, who dismissed his trigger-happy colleague.

  Once FOCA became properly established as the constructors’ association in the mid-1970s, Enzo Ferrari began taking an interest and started to invite all the teams regularly to his headquarters in Maranello, near Modena. Originally, we had called the association F1CA (F1 Constructors’ Association), but Ferrari told us that ‘fica’ was not a polite word in Italian. He suggested we make the simple change to FOCA, as in Formula One Constructors’ Association.

  Sometimes all the team principals went to Maranello; sometimes, as already mentioned, it was just Bernie and me. Ferrari really enjoyed holding court with the teams; he loved the racing gossip and always gave us an excellent lunch in the building by the test track. He believed Parmesan cheese was an aphrodisiac and liked to put a big lump of it in front of Bernie when he wasn’t looking, saying in Italian: ‘This will get him going!’ After a lunch that always included plenty of Lambrusco, we would be let loose on the Ferrari test track.

  On another occasion, after meeting Ferrari with all the teams, we arrived back at Bologna airport after dark and in freezing fog to find the pilot of the plane we had hired saying the airport was closed but he’d managed to book hotel rooms for us all in the town. None of us wanted to spend Saturday night in Bologna, so we asked Colin Chapman, an experienced pilot, to go with him out to the runway and explain that it was all right to take off, but even Chapman came back shaking his head. Undeterred, Bernie suggested we all go out and sit in the plane; then we persuaded the pilot to start an engine to keep us warm; then we said we might as well go to the end of the runway in case the fog lifts for a few minutes.

  At that point, Bernie nearly ruined everything because, when the plane started to move, people in the terminal building who were resigned to spending the night there started to crowd into the windows, curious to see what was happening. Bernie pointed this out and then, loud enough for the pilot to hear, joked: ‘They’ve come to watch the shunt.’ The fog stubbornly didn’t lift but after a while we persuaded the pilot to make a run despite the icy surface. Chapman sat in the co-pilot seat reading off the speeds so that the pilot could concentrate on looking for the runway lights through the fog. Once we were a few feet above the ground it was a beautiful clear night.

  Although there were no jets except for the occasional hired one, private flying in turbo-prop and piston aircraft was becoming more common in Formula One. But, like the racing, it was by no means safe. Taking off from a field behind Brands Hatch with Colin Chapman at the controls of his own plane, we were all in a hurry to get to Gatwick, but Bernie and his driver Nelson Piquet had to stand as the plane was too full. With a very heavy load, Chapman was only just able to clear the telephone wires at the end of the field, but explained they weren’t a problem – he’d often had telephone wire wrapped round the wheels of his plane. Electricity cables, however, were a far more serious issue.

  By the late 1970s, we had pushed the money paid by the race promoters to the point where some were complaining they couldn’t pay. We knew that this was not really true – just a bargaining position – so we countered each time by offering to take over the financial risk of the event while they continued to run all the sporting and regulatory el
ements. We first used this ploy in 1974, but no one took us up on our offer until 1977 when the Automobilclub von Deutschland, the traditional promoter of the German Grand Prix, unexpectedly accepted and wanted us to start the following year. Suddenly, the teams were responsible for the finances of the 1978 German Grand Prix at Hockenheim.

  By then, backed by the teams, Bernie and I were effectively running Formula One. The president of the CSI, Pierre Ugeux, was a mild-mannered man whose day job was running one of the Belgian national utilities. We got on well with him and, after the confrontation with WCR, he pretty much let us run things as we pleased. During that year, though, Jean-Marie Balestre, the president of the French national sporting authority whom we had encountered during our Paris stand-off over WCR, was elected to succeed Ugeux as head of the governing body.

  With a successful publishing business, quite why Balestre was so ambitious to succeed in motor sport politics was not clear. He certainly liked the limelight and loved going on the podium at the end of the race to be pictured with the drivers. Yes, he had an interest in safety, but I always suspected this was primarily because it made relations with the drivers easier. Balestre understood very little of the technicalities of the sport, but he did understand the really big political issues. He was one of the first to recognise that the commercial management of Formula One had to be kept separate from sporting control, although, as we shall see, when first elected he tried to seize all the money and power for the FIA. It would be unfair to criticise him for his vanity and self-promotion, even though this verged on the eccentric towards the end, because many people who put themselves forward for prominent public roles have the same motivation. In the end, what matters is achievement and he was undoubtedly a person of genuine ability.

  Relations with Balestre were good immediately after his election and he said he wanted to work with us. But, perhaps understandably, it became clear that as the new president of the FIA’s sporting commission, the CSI, and thus head of motor sport’s world governing body, he was not prepared to accept that we, not the FIA, ran Formula One.

  Although it didn’t seem like it at the time, Balestre’s presidency was just what motor sport needed. He was a catalyst for change and, without him, things might well have continued as before and resulted in the fragmentation of international motor racing and rallying into a number of governing bodies, as happened with boxing and other sports. The same forces that led tennis, cricket and even chess to splinter away from their established structures were certainly pressing in motor sport and, as we shall see, we ourselves even set up a rival body, the World Federation of Motor Sport, in case we were unable to persuade Balestre to back off. But multiple governing bodies would have hindered development and greatly delayed improvements to safety, as we were to explain to the European Commission when they suggested just such a framework a few years later. Taking his presidency as a whole, Balestre unquestionably did more good than harm, but only after his major dispute with FOCA which very nearly put an end to our attempts to improve and modernise Formula One.

  12

  THE FOCA–FISA WAR

  Following his 1978 election as head of international motor sport, Jean-Marie Balestre had made it clear that he wanted the FIA to have control over all technical, sporting and commercial aspects of Formula One. To the teams, this was anathema. The immediate problem was money – if Balestre had control of the FIA, which included almost all the promoters of Formula One events, it would be able to impose lower rewards for the teams and simultaneously demand higher entry fees. We knew that such abuse of monopoly might well be illegal, at least in Europe, but we also knew Brussels was very political. Securing a decision against the FIA, whose member organisations had close relations with several European governments, would be difficult.

  Even more worrying in the medium and longer term was our certainty that Balestre would follow the interests of the car industry rather than those of the independent and predominantly British teams. The FIA had a long tradition of backing the car industry despite the fact that the industry’s interests by no means always coincided with those of the ordinary motorists who made up the membership of the FIA clubs.

  Major car manufacturers had a history of coming and going in Formula One, and their participation from one year to the next depended on the whim of the main board. For the industry, Formula One was essentially a marketing tool like any other. If they came in, they needed to win and winning was much easier if a compliant governing body was prepared to manipulate the technical rules to help them. The British FOCA membership, by contrast, consisted of teams whose sole business was Formula One. We had nowhere else to go without enormous, and possibly fatal, disruption to our businesses. The danger of total control falling into the hands of an FIA that would not worry about the British teams but do the bidding of the car industry seemed obvious and potentially ruinous.

  As a result, a power struggle for the control of Formula One became inevitable. Our main weapon was the backing of a large majority of the teams ranged against the FIA with its support from the three manufacturers’ teams: Alfa Romeo, Renault and traditionally Ferrari. The FIA also had control of the technical regulations and the right to change them at short notice if it could claim this was being done for reasons of safety. Short-notice changes caused major difficulties for UK teams because we lacked the resources to redesign and build new cars quickly. And safety was a very subjective concept in those unscientific days. Public opinion made it extremely difficult for our side to resist a change labelled ‘safety’. As a former journalist, Balestre fully understood this and also knew that if he could get the drivers on his side, our position would be untenable.

  Hostilities began with a collision at the start of the 1979 Argentine Grand Prix between John Watson, a FOCA (McLaren) driver, and Jody Scheckter in his Ferrari. Balestre decided to set up an ad hoc commission which fined Watson without hearing him. The fine was not paid and Watson was left facing exclusion from the Brazilian Grand Prix two weeks later.

  In Brazil, Bernie and I had a stormy meeting with Balestre: we said it was outrageous to impose a fine without a hearing and, if Watson were excluded, the teams would not race. After a lot of argument, Balestre agreed that all future Formula One decisions would be taken by the official F1 Working Group, on which we were all represented. He promised to announce this at a press conference but went back on his word and spoke ambiguously, so we got him in a room on his own and insisted he write out the agreement by hand. Watson’s team sponsors, Marlboro, then paid the fine.

  A few days later, on 16 February, the teams all met with Enzo Ferrari at Maranello and agreed to ask the FIA for autonomy in running Formula One. The FIA Committee was meeting the next day and predictably refused. At that committee meeting, Balestre proposed that the FIA change the name of motor sport’s international governing body, from Commission Sportive Internationale (CSI) to ‘Fédération Mondiale du Sport Automobile’. He had already had an armband made with this name and had worn it at the Argentine Grand Prix. However, ‘mondiale’ (world) was a bit too grand for the committee, who turned it down, and his armband was never seen again.

  Balestre was really keen on the ‘mondiale’ aspect. Soon after becoming president of the CSI, he changed the name of its executive committee to ‘World Council’ and, on one occasion much later, shortly after my election, he and I were delayed momentarily by security as we entered the Crillon hotel (which is next door to the FIA headquarters in Paris). Balestre asked what the security was for and was told the president of a particular country was there on an official visit. ‘But that’s just one country,’ he told the security man. ‘We are both world presidents!’ I caught the man’s eye and could see he understood why I was struggling to keep a straight face.

  After his minor renaming setback, Balestre settled for the more modest Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile (FISA). Once this was agreed he could say he was president of an international sports federation rather than merely the president of
the FIA’s sporting commission, the CSI. The main reason he gave the committee for needing a more prestigious name was the growing threat of FOCA. Legally, however, the FISA was still only a commission of the FIA and Balestre merely a vice-president of the FIA itself. He eventually became president in 1985.

  The unity of the teams did not last – several issues divided us. Fundamentally, the UK teams were better at chassis design and using aerodynamics to increase speeds, particularly cornering speeds, while the continental teams, mainly big car companies plus Ferrari, led the way in engines and using power output for speed. We all had to rely on the same engine, built by Cosworth in Northampton, whose sole business, unlike the multinational car manufacturers, was making racing engines. It had to make a profit and could spend only very limited amounts on development. The sport was essentially a contest between two engineering superiorities: the more powerful cars of Alfa Romeo, Ferrari and Renault versus the less powerful but more agile chassis of the British teams.

  One side or the other could gain an advantage, depending on how the rules were framed. As already noted, our problem was that because of the close relationship between the car industry and the FIA, the big car companies had much more influence over the governing body than we did.

  However, Ferrari – although (then) 50 per cent owned by Fiat – was in many ways more akin to a FOCA team than, for example, Renault. They had enormous prestige in Formula One, being the only team to have participated in the World Championship continuously from its start in 1950, and the company was also world famous as the builder of outstandingly desirable road cars. Enzo Ferrari himself was politically astute, siding with FISA or FOCA according to his interests at any given moment. He was essentially the fulcrum between us and FISA and, by a small movement towards one or the other, could produce an effect out of all proportion to the size of his team. Yet, although Ferrari would often disagree with FOCA about technical matters (where his interests were usually closer to those of the big car companies), he did not want Balestre in charge of Formula One’s finances.