by Max Mosley
After a couple of times round the test track, he stopped the car back at the transporters and suggested we swap places. I thought that brave of him. When we got out of the car, Carlos Sainz, who was also there testing for the Ford team that day, said: ‘Now you’ve driven the car, surely you agree that the air restrictor is too small? We need more power, 300 bhp is not enough!’ I had to tell him I was far too slow to appreciate any lack of power but was very flattered that he should think I could tell the difference. All a bit silly at my age, perhaps, but as they say: grow up means give up. And I don’t think any genuine motor sport enthusiast would have refused any of those rides, given the opportunity.
In the World Rally Championship, the manufacturer teams were spending absurd sums. On the Greek Acropolis Rally, for example, a top team would use up to 30 vehicles plus three helicopters. They would also keep a fixed-wing plane in the air solely to maintain radio communications between helicopters, vehicles and their central command post. All this to look after a team of two competing cars! But it was necessary because each car was serviced before it went on to a special stage and again as it came off.
This seemed mad. It was ludicrously expensive and surely contrary to the purpose of rallying, which the manufacturers always said was to improve performance and durability. After a certain amount of consultation, I suggested scrapping pre- and post-stage servicing and substituting two or at most three service parks per day. I also felt teams should no longer spend weeks on ‘reconnaissance’ before a rally. But first I had to get this through the World Council.
One organiser argued against prohibiting reconnaissance (preparation for a rally) because the hotels in the region would suffer. I pointed out that they could pay the hotels if necessary, but it was absurd to waste fortunes running these very expensive cars simply to boost hotel occupancy levels. Guy Goutard, the president of the Rally Commission, came to see me with César Torres, head of the Portuguese club and an FIA vice-president. Both were former competitors and major figures who were greatly respected in the rally world, not least by me. They argued passionately against change, citing tradition and the classic structure of rallies. I told them I agreed, but if costs drove the competitors away, all the tradition in the world would not save our championship.
Eventually my arguments persuaded them and reconnaissance and servicing were drastically reduced. The drivers came on board, too, agreeing that two runs through a stage would be enough for the co-driver to make accurate pace notes. None of the predicted problems arose and much money was saved – no one would turn back to the traditional ways now. We also stopped organisers setting schedules on public roads that could not be met without breaking speed limits. But, on the other side, we had to threaten to stop holding the British round of the World Rally Championship in Wales unless the overzealous local police agreed not to operate temporary speed traps in breach of their own guidelines. Perhaps a foolish desire for publicity inspired their implied threat to make an example of some of the most famous drivers in the world.
That’s not to say speed wasn’t a major concern – in fact, all over the world we endured alarming problems with crowds’ proximity to dauntingly quick cars on the special stages. Understandably, they wanted to watch some of the best drivers in the world going as fast as they could against the clock. Of course it’s very exciting and young people, particularly, like to stand as close to the cars as possible. But if a driver loses control and the car goes off the road, spectators are at risk unless they are standing somewhere safe – on top of a high bank for example. The drivers are all at their personal limit and mistakes happen.
When we sent a safety vehicle down the stage to ask the spectators to move, they would often revert to their previous, dangerous positions before the competition cars arrived. I decided the solution was to start using helicopters. Balestre had opposed the idea because it was expensive and no one had been killed recently. ‘Where are the bodies?’ he asked. I said that was like refusing to stop small children playing on a motorway because none of them had yet been killed. I insisted and the World Council agreed. To prove our point, we now have chilling video footage of cars going off exactly where a group of people had been standing before our helicopter team persuaded them to move.
All this change required a cultural shift by the organisers. In my Manufacturers’ Commission days I had visited the French round of the World Rally Championship, where the organiser had allowed someone to set up a buvette at the end of a very fast downhill stretch in the middle of what would have been the escape road if one of the cars had a brake problem. Spectators, marshals and the odd policeman were enjoying a drink. When I told Balestre (as head of the French motor sport authority) he couldn’t see any harm in it. When I told him I felt the only safe place in the immediate vicinity was up a tree, he was quite funny about my tree climbing in comments to the French press.
More than a decade later, in 2007, we held a round of the World Rally Championship in Ireland. We had been invited by politicians on both sides of the Irish Sea and the idea was that the itinerary would go backwards and forwards across the north–south border and help draw the two communities together. We knew both sides would work happily together in the rally; we had seen the same thing with international rallies in Lebanon and Bosnia despite local armed conflicts. A common interest in sport brings people together. I managed to get the FIA to approve World Championship status for the Irish event; no easy task when so many countries wanted a round. As a result, I was invited to Stormont, where a special stage was to be held in the grounds. The car I was in stopped at the back of the building. I didn’t ask why – it’s always best just to go with the flow.
Then we drove round to the front where, waiting on the steps, were Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness. Anyone from the British Isles will understand why this was one of the most surreal moments of my presidency, but needless to say I was very pleased. Apart from anything else, I was exceptionally interested to meet them. We all went to Paisley’s room (he was then first minister and McGuinness was deputy), where we had a cup of tea. The atmosphere was pleasant and at one point McGuinness joked: ‘The last person to sit with us in that chair you are on was Tony Blair.’ It was hard to imagine how things had been a few years previously. Afterwards, Martin McGuinness took me round the building and showed me the parliament chamber. It was a memorable and riveting visit even before I found myself sitting next to Ian Paisley at the dinner that evening. He was fascinating company and I was surprised to discover he had a great sense of humour.
During the last two decades of the 20th century, the historic racing car scene began to take off, broadly made up of enthusiasts who had bought the kind of car they would have coveted when young but could only afford much later in life. The problem this poses, of course, is the combination of middle-aged drivers and old racing cars with no modern safety features. Though beguilingly beautiful to look at, the cars remain as dangerous as they were in the era in which they were built. The hazards were clear but it seemed wrong to interfere – these were all grown-ups doing it for fun and presumably entirely aware of the risks. We had a duty to ensure young drivers were protected as far as possible from the risks, but I didn’t feel it was our role to play nanny to a much older generation. As far as practicable, though, we imposed modern safety measures like current crash helmets and, significantly, the races take place on circuits that are emphatically safer than they ever have been.
My slightly laissez-faire attitude sometimes brought me into conflict with our safety and medical experts, particularly when it came to drivers who had actually raced in the past. I didn’t feel we could tell the greats, such as Stirling Moss or Jack Brabham, that they could no longer wear the original (very unsafe) helmets and overalls they had donned when competing for the World Championship in the 1950s and 1960s. When they were driving their classic racing cars in modern demonstrations and competitions, they understandably wanted to use their original equipment. Fortunately, I managed to get the World Cou
ncil to make an exception for them, despite the entirely sensible objections of the FIA’s safety people. The FIA can now give a special dispensation to former Grand Prix drivers to wear their original overalls and helmets.
I can see the appeal of racing historic racing cars, but it has always seemed myopic and plain wrong to me that often unique and very special antiques are endangered in such a way. I felt they were part of the heritage of motor racing and the automobile industry. People in one hundred or two hundred years’ time would think we were vandals for not preserving them more carefully. I tried to persuade the historic movement to race replicas rather than the originals but without success. Of course, there is something special about driving the actual car that one of the great drivers of the past had raced, but I felt it should be just driven, not raced. Thankfully, companies like Mercedes-Benz preserve their old racing cars and, although they take them out for demonstrations, they are never raced, so there will be something original left for future generations. I gather the FIA is now encouraging the use of replicas.
My brief was trans-generational, making sure Moss and Brabham were unencumbered at one end of the scale and, in my role with international karting, ensuring that expense did not block young people’s ambitions of participating in motor sport. I was always conscious of the need to try to control the costs of karting because it suffers from the drawback that performance can be bought with money. A child with rich parents has a better chance than the less well-off, and the only way of thwarting this is a centrally operated, single-make series that completely levels the playing field. I was always in favour of it but, if you try to impose single-make championships, you come up against the commercial interests of the kart builders. There could also be competition law problems.
One of my regrets is that I didn’t leave behind a clear, low-cost path from local-level karting to Formula One when I finished my presidency. The commercial interests of those who make a living from motor sport are the main obstacle. Everyone, from the kart suppliers at grassroots level right up to the people operating GP2 and Formula Renault 3.5 just below Formula One, has a vested interest. There was concerted opposition when the FIA backed a one-make, centrally operated Formula Two championship as a very low-cost alternative means of gaining a Formula One super licence. It was clearly in the interests of motor sport generally to reduce the cost of access to Formula One because the lower the cost, the greater the number of talented drivers who would have a chance, but the vested interests prevailed.
Although I didn’t have the time to become intimately involved in karting, I did interfere directly once when I received a call to say that a British kart driver was being kept out of a big competition in France on the apparently spurious grounds that his medical certificate was not in order. I called the president of karting and asked him to check that the certificate was OK and, if it was, insist that the organisers allow the driver to compete. It worked and the driver rewarded us by winning his heat and the final. A few days later, the 15-year-old driver sent me an autographed picture by way of thanks. It was a picture of him on the front cover of a McLaren in-house magazine. I was really amused by the gesture and thought, with that much attitude, he’d go far. That was the first time I’d heard of Lewis Hamilton.
The kind of cars that race at Le Mans always caused us difficulties. They are essentially two-seater racing cars with bodywork enclosing the wheels, which share some of the technology of Formula One but are entirely different in other respects. The races are generally long distance – Le Mans, of course, lasts for 24 hours, but there is also a Sebring 12-hour race in America and various other long-distance races in Europe and around the world. Shortly after the FISA election I called a meeting of what was then the Sports Car Commission to see who would be running a team in 1992. There were so few firm promises that the commission even proposed cancelling the Sports Car World Championship.
As mentioned before, there were a number of famous long-distance races in the 1960s and, back then, this form of racing was more important and better funded than Formula One. But it was never centrally managed and most of the great races have now disappeared. Although technically under the FIA, the Le Mans race was so important that the organising club was able to make its own rules for this one event, and I never managed to persuade them to join fully in a central rule-making process. Their rules had to be submitted, of course, and we could veto anything dangerous or unfair, but we could not insist that the Le Mans people sit down with other organisers in an FIA commission to agree common technical rules.
The person responsible for making the technical regulations for Le Mans liked to announce them each year. It was his big moment, but it didn’t make for stability or a universally applicable set of rules. For obvious reasons, stable rules common to all competitions in each category, and which do not change unpredictably, are important to anyone building racing cars. I made several attempts to sort this out but had no real success.
The evolution of the Formula One World Championship since 1969 when Bernie and I became involved compared with what has happened to some of the most famous races for so-called sports prototypes is the best answer to those who say the approach we took to Formula One was bad for the sport. The failure of those races to earn significant worldwide coverage shows that central rule-making combined with central commercial management are essential if you want global reach. Nevertheless, Le Mans itself got along very nicely with private entrants and small constructors, and the occasional big-budget manufacturer looking for a prestigious win without too much competition.
My successor, Jean Todt (who won Le Mans for Peugeot as a team manager), has apparently succeeded where I failed. The FIA’s World Endurance Championship is now sufficiently attractive to persuade the Le Mans organisers to join in the normal process for agreeing technical and sporting rules internationally. This united approach can only be positive for long-distance racing. In Formula One, Monaco could easily have made a case for special rules for their very abnormal circuit but, had they done so, they and Formula One would have been much less successful.
It wasn’t all work. Every year at the Monaco Grand Prix, Flavio Briatore would give a party on his large yacht. As a host, he was among the best; his gatherings were well organised and he laid on excellent food. The only problem was he specialised in billionaires, so anyone like me who wasn’t one would feel quite poor in his guests’ company. Sitting with a group that included Bernie’s wife Slavica, Mohamed Al-Fayed, then the owner of Harrods in London, Ernesto Bertarelli and Lakshmi Mittal, the other side of Al-Fayed, Slavica remarked very quietly to me about Mittal’s strange haircut. We both started laughing and Al-Fayed leant over to ask what was going on. I told him and he promptly turned to Mittal and said: ‘They are laughing at your haircut.’ Quick as a flash Mittal replied: ‘I’m not surprised, I get it cut at Harrods.’
23
IMOLA 1994: SENNA’S DEATH AND ITS EFFECT
In one weekend during my first year as president of the full FIA in 1994, a succession of events occurred that had a profound effect on motor sport and, as it turned out, far-reaching consequences for safety on the roads. It reminded me yet again of all the tragedies I had witnessed in top-level motor sport, but now, at last, came a real opportunity to do something about it.
On 1 May 1994, Ayrton Senna was killed during the San Marino GP. The previous day during qualifying, Roland Ratzenberger, an Austrian driver in his debut season, had died in a horrifying accident. There were three other life-threatening incidents during the same weekend. The first involved Rubens Barrichello, the next a mechanic in the pit lane and finally a member of the public in the start-line grandstand.
Senna should not have died. Other drivers had crashed in the same place without serious injury. But part of the car’s suspension penetrated his helmet. The FIA’s chief medical officer, Professor Sid Watkins, was a leading brain surgeon and professor of neurosurgery at the London Hospital. One of the innovations he had introduced since starting his ro
le in 1978 was a medical car on standby with a doctor on board who was skilled in resuscitation. He knew that, provided the necessary resuscitation procedures were begun within two minutes, irreversible brain damage (which will generally occur if the brain is without oxygen for more than two minutes) could be avoided even if the driver had no pulse. The driver could then be put on a life-support system and his injuries properly assessed. Sid was in the car that reached Senna within the two-minute window after the accident and carried out the procedures, but it was immediately obvious to him that Ayrton was unlikely to survive. This was devastating for him because he and Ayrton were close friends.
Ayrton was by then one of the world’s leading sportsmen. His rivalry with Alain Prost had gripped millions, mainly because they were so different. Prost was calm, down to earth, rational and calculating. Senna was spiritual and emotional. Prost once told me it was worrying driving against Senna because he was deeply religious – he thought God was with him in the car and was quite simply unafraid. For outright speed, Senna was unmatched, as his extraordinary succession of pole positions shows, but Prost may have been the better all-round driver. I don’t feel qualified to judge.
There had not been a fatality at a Grand Prix since Riccardo Paletti was killed at Montreal in 1982, so the shock was immense. The media storm continued all week. With two deaths, one of them the world’s most famous driver, the media wanted someone or something to blame. Several commentators said it was the elimination of electronic driver aids, a classic post hoc point. It was an intensely stupid inference but was nevertheless widely reported. It was obvious nonsense because that generation of drivers had all acquired their skills in the days before electronic aids. Indeed, the leading drivers including Senna were opposed to them, as explained later, but this was all forgotten in the general hysteria.
