Formula One and Beyond

by Max Mosley

  We brought in grooved tyres for 1998. Some drivers objected, still believing that less grip was dangerous. When first tried, the grooved tyres were pronounced undrivable and hopelessly slow, but the problems were soon solved. The traditionalists always disliked grooved tyres (strange, because treaded tyres had been the norm for 80 of the previous 100 years) but at least the engineers could do the sums and understand the thinking.

  The grooves were only necessary when there was competition between tyre manufacturers. With a single tyre supplier, the FIA can simply ask for a bit less grip. After all, it’s the same for all the teams. But if you have competition between two or more tyre companies, which we had until recently, the grooves were a fair and very effective means of keeping cornering speeds under control. Although it was 30 years and more since Jim Clark’s death at Hockenheim and Roger Williamson’s horrific accident at Zandvoort had made such a deep impression on me, safety was at last at the top of the agenda, and science was being deployed to further it. And, before long, this thinking would extend far beyond the track to everyday cars on the roads, changing the culture of the global car industry and saving countless thousands of lives.

  24

  CONFLICT IN FORMULA ONE

  Even before that harrowing weekend at Imola in 1994, my resolve to stay out of Formula One after the 1991 election had been short-lived. Electronic systems, developed to assist the drivers, had become a genuine and growing concern. They were expensive but, more importantly, they were going to render much of a driver’s armoury of skills redundant. Pretty soon we would get to the point where there would in effect be a second driver in the car in the form of a computer, which would take over an ever increasing number of the tasks traditionally carried out by the driver. This is precisely what you want for road cars, where the more that can be done to assist the driver, the fewer the accidents and the better the traffic will flow. But motor sport is supposed to be a test of driving skill rather than a means of getting from A to B safely and efficiently on the roads.

  Ayrton Senna found the increasing use of electronics worrying, even depressing, because he recognised that the new technology was bound to devalue the driver’s skill. At Christmas 1992, he sent me a card on which he had written by hand:

  To Max,

  92 wasn’t particularly great! Perhaps this is the time for a change. Rather soon before is too late. F1 cannot continue like this any longer, it’s got to change!

  Ayrton Senna

  Apart from anything else, I was impressed that he could write English that well – it’s one thing to speak a foreign language, quite another to write it with only one very small mistake.

  I took this as a plea to get rid of the electronic aids and we knew that other top drivers felt the same. I fully understood that motor racing had always involved a machine as well as a human, and that the greatest driver would be helpless without a suitable car, but the World Council and most people in motor sport felt that it was for the driver to make the most of a mechanical car without assistance. It was the essence of his skill. Inside the FIA, we thoroughly agreed with Senna.

  Having found a consensus in 1993 that the drivers should drive the cars without electronic assistance, we set out to ban the new systems. The result was a big discussion with the teams about so-called driver aids. I proposed the ban to the F1 Commission and had a precise piece of text prepared, but the teams at the forefront of electronic development objected to the wording. They didn’t want any real restriction. In the end, I offered them a very simple rule: ‘The driver must drive the car alone and unaided.’ They liked that. There was no definition of the driver aids we were trying to ban and they thought the rule would be unenforceable because it was so vague. They had missed the obvious lawyer’s point that, without a definition in the rules, a ‘driver aid’ was whatever the stewards (and ultimately the FIA Court of Appeal) thought it was. Those who take an interest in such things know very well that the less clear the law, the greater the power of the judges. Sometimes the rather narrow outlook of some team principals could be helpful.

  We were now armed with a very broad rule. But then it was explained to me by one of the teams that we could never genuinely check because it would take thousands of years to penetrate the software source codes. Our response was: you are going to have to give us your source code. It’s no different from opening the bonnet of a car – if you want to race, we have to be able to check that your car complies with the rules. If we don’t have your source code, then we can’t verify that it contains no illicit driver aids and your cars won’t leave the pit lane. Two of the teams were dilatory, claiming the source code was proprietary and belonged to a major manufacturer. So we fined them; and we eventually received all the codes.

  Now we needed proper computing know-how if we were to get on top of this new technology. We began by recruiting Alan Prudom, who had previously worked on the computer control systems for nuclear power stations. He brought a whole new level of expertise and could certainly match the sort of people the major Formula One teams were hiring. Alan was able to access the information in a team’s electronic equipment even when it was hidden, which was to become very relevant.

  One unfortunate aspect of the 1994 ban on driver aids was the suspicion that Benetton were still using the now banned traction control and launch control. Launch control was a special program to govern all the parameters when the race started so as to optimise the car’s acceleration. There had to be enough power to allow just the right amount of slippage between wheel and road but not enough for full wheel spin. It was very clever but now illegal. In order to check, we seized a number of electronic devices at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, among them those used by the Benetton team. Unfortunately, in all the confusion and stress following that disastrous race weekend and its aftermath, I made the mistake of authorising their return to Benetton before they had been fully checked.

  Later in the season, we seized their electronic devices again and our IT experts discovered a hidden launch control program. Benetton claimed it had never been deployed that season but that removing it from the software was too complex. They said it had been hidden to prevent it being switched on by mistake. Having given back the Imola boxes, we could not prove one way or the other whether they had actually put the illegal aid to use that season. There was strong suspicion that they probably had, however, and we decided to publish the finding, confirming its existence and that it had been switched off. Other teams were quick to say that removing the now illegal programs over the winter had been an easy task, an assertion that stoked considerable press excitement at the German Grand Prix.

  Another concern was the sheer volume of communication that was now common between cars and the pits. Modern Formula One cars have hundreds of sensors, all streaming data back to the teams. We were not particularly worried about this, but we were concerned about information coming back the other way that might be used to help drive the car. We introduced very restrictive rules about what could pass from pit to car, likewise with verbal radio communications. Plainly, a team would not want its rivals to listen to radio discussions with their drivers, so these transmissions were routinely encrypted. But we insisted that our staff in the tower should be able to listen to everything to make sure there was no cheating. Today, the teams allow non-critical conversations to be broadcast, which enhances the TV coverage, and all communications are open and accessible to both the FIA and the broadcasters.

  At one point, when discussing cost, I asked the teams if all this information from the sensors was really necessary. The banks of computers behind the pits and the personnel to analyse it in real time were clearly very expensive. Oh yes, they said, it is expensive but it’s for safety. I asked why they couldn’t just have a warning light to tell the driver to stop if there were a safety problem. They admitted they could, but said even if the computers were not really about safety, the equipment so impressed the sponsors that it brought in more money than it cost. I had no answer to that.


  The ban on electronic driver assistance was the first real divergence between what was needed on the road and what is useful in racing. Just as this technology was undesirable in a sporting context, it was ideal for roads (our Brussels campaign for electronic stability control on road cars finally bore fruit on 1 November 2014, when ESC became compulsory on all new cars sold in the EU). Devices such as electronic stability control, for example, save many lives in everyday motoring. Some journalists and even teams argued that it was absurd to prohibit devices in Formula One that were becoming commonplace for road cars. To most of us in the FIA, that was missing the point. Reducing the need for driver skill in Formula One diminishes the sport because driver skill is an essential element of motor sport. But reducing the need for skill on the roads (where it is often in short supply) enhances the safety of all road users because it lessens the likelihood that an error will cause an accident.

  We also had a problem with Formula One fuel at the beginning of the 1990s. There was a strange smell in the pit area and it was noticeable that the personnel fuelling the cars in the garages were wearing elaborate protective clothing. The cars were supposed to use fuel that a motorist could buy from the pump but, when I asked what exactly that meant, I learned it could mean almost anything. Long-established FIA regulations specified little more than a maximum octane rating. High-octane fuel was synonymous with high performance in popular perception but meaningless when fuel company chemists got going. An early example of this was the fuel in the BMW turbo engine back in 1983 described in chapter 15.

  Pump fuel can have several hundred components and, worse, these vary according to the time of year and the latitude of the country where you buy it, as well as the characteristics of the local refineries. This does not matter for road cars, as their relatively low-performance engines are able to accommodate the differences, but in a racing engine at very high rpm and high compression ratios, the composition of the fuel becomes a critical performance factor. And with a vast number of components, the possibilities for making a special fuel just for Formula One and claiming it was pump fuel were obvious. For example, one of the favoured additives was norbornadiene, something you might find in rocket fuel. Its purpose was to increase the speed of combustion in these very high-revving engines.

  We could not deny the fuel companies scope to develop new and improved pump fuels because this sort of research was an important reason for their participation in Formula One. Yet we needed to make sure it was a fuel that might genuinely be sold at the pump in the future. The obvious answer from an administrative point of view – a standard fuel – would have deprived Formula One of a lot of sponsorship.

  The oil companies helped us produce some elaborate regulations. Provided a fuel complied, you could be sure that it was genuinely a potential pump fuel. But given the unavoidable complexity of the rules for pump fuel and the huge number of possible components, how do you quickly check that the fuel you have just sampled at a race is legal? You could send it away for detailed analysis but you would risk having to exclude a car long after the race results were published.

  We hit on the idea of asking the fuel companies to submit a sample well before it was used in a race, so that it could then be fully analysed and checked for conformity. The next step was to use gas chromatography to take a ‘fingerprint’ of the sample. With the relevant instrument among our equipment at each Grand Prix, we could then compare the ‘fingerprint’ of the fuel taken from the car with that of the sample we had already analysed and thus check very quickly if the two were identical.

  The first time a sample failed it was from a car using Elf fuel. When the stewards took action, a rather tiresome PR lady from the fuel company told the press we didn’t know what we were doing and our equipment was primitive. She was backed up by top Elf management (the same people who were later involved in a major French political scandal), who were very aggressive and even started legal proceedings in Paris against the FIA.

  Inevitably, and annoyingly, this created a media storm. Fortunately we had a ‘B’ sample, which we sent to the world-renowned SGS laboratory in Germany and they confirmed our result. Interestingly, when analysed, the Elf fuel was actually legal under the rules but was not the same as the sample they had submitted, so did not comply. There was no question of them trying to cheat or use an illegal fuel. They had merely made a change without resubmitting it. After that, everyone knew our equipment worked and we could detect even very small differences and thus guarantee the cars were using pump fuel.

  Running the sport was an endless succession of complications like that, particularly in Formula One. Trying to make sure everyone plays within the rules is extremely difficult. Teams routinely change as many as 100 elements on their cars between races in a constant search for more performance, and all the top ones have dozens of highly qualified engineers. Many of them have doctorates in engineering and related subjects. They are constantly at work and part of their remit is to push to the very limit of the regulations. Against this, the FIA has a small group of engineers, computer experts and fuel specialists led by Charlie Whiting, who is the head of the FIA technical department as well as the race director.

  None of this is cheating – it’s perfectly legitimate to go to the limit of the rules – but inevitably there are disputes, sometimes between a team and FIA experts, sometimes between the teams themselves. The race stewards resolve disputes but there is also a right of appeal to the FIA International Court of Appeal. Its members are senior independent lawyers, all from different countries and with a good knowledge of motor sport, who are nominated by their national motor sport authorities and elected by the FIA General Assembly.

  As budgets increased in the 1990s and the cars became increasingly sophisticated, there was a tendency for the teams constantly to introduce new devices that tested the boundaries of the rules. These would often be very expensive to design and develop, and risked being ruled illegal when first used at a race, wasting the money spent. So, early in my presidency, we invited the teams to start submitting their latest ideas in strict confidence at the design stage. Charlie would look at the design and offer an opinion as to its legality. This was on the clear understanding that he was only giving an opinion, not a ruling, but nevertheless an indication of the line the FIA technical department would take. It was a sort of prior notification – a concept I tried to introduce years later in my dispute with Britain’s tabloid press.

  If Charlie and his group thought it illegal but the team disagreed, they were welcome to take the device to a race and try their chances with the stewards. Conversely, Charlie might OK something but another team might protest. Again, it would be up to the stewards. Sometimes he would discuss a borderline idea with me. I never ceased to be fascinated and surprised by the ingenuity and originality of some of the concepts. I think one of the reasons Formula One attracts such brilliant engineers is the short time between conceiving an idea and seeing it applied in real life. By contrast, in most areas of engineering – for example, aviation or defence – the time lapse between a novel idea and its practical application can be many years.

  We also told the teams that if they didn’t inform us about a new device which we later discovered and ruled illegal, we would presume they didn’t tell us because they intended to conceal it and therefore cheat. This system worked surprisingly well. Charlie received literally hundreds of submissions but there were almost no instances of his opinion being challenged by a team or overruled by the stewards or the Court of Appeal.

  Breaking the rules could potentially have lethal consequences. At the 1994 German Grand Prix, Benetton had a massive fire in the pit lane. An investigation showed that the team had removed a filter from the refuelling system on Jos Verstappen’s car. This reduced the time of a pit stop by about a second but its absence had allowed dirt to jam open a valve, hence the leak and the fire. Benetton got away with it (just) so far as we were concerned by claiming a junior employee had removed the filter and that someone
from the fuel rig manufacturer had given permission for this. To our considerable surprise, a representative of the fuel rig manufacturer confirmed the story.

  Michael Schumacher, then also driving for Benetton, was already racing under appeal because of an incident at the British Grand Prix two weeks earlier. He had been shown a black flag (a signal to stop and come into the pits) following an incident at the start of the race, but had not stopped. He claimed not to have seen the black flags, even though they were placed on either side of the start line. The stewards imposed a modest fine, but we thought it very serious if he had indeed deliberately ignored a flag signal because the flags are primarily used for the safety of drivers and marshals. The matter was brought before the World Council. After a detailed hearing, the defence was not believed and Schumacher lost his second place at Silverstone and was banned for two races. With the suspension under appeal, Schumacher was able to start the next race, his home German Grand Prix.

  Controversy escalated further for Benetton when, a month later at Spa, Schumacher’s ‘plank’ (a device to keep a minimum gap between the car and the ground in order to reduce downforce and hence cornering speed) was found to be too thin. The team claimed it had been damaged when he went sideways over a kerb but could not explain why, in that case, all the wear lines were in the direction of travel. Despite having George Carman QC, then England’s most high-profile lawyer, to defend them, it was clear they had run the car too low in order to gain downforce and hence performance.

  Schumacher was excluded again, this time wiping out a victory. When he also lost his appeal against the two-race ban from Silverstone, his big lead in the championship disappeared. Even so, he eventually became world champion for the first time that year by a mere one-point margin over Damon Hill after yet another controversial incident at the final race in Australia. Schumacher went off the road while ahead of Hill and had apparently damaged his car. When Hill went to pass him, he came across the track and the two collided. Schumacher was out immediately; Hill tried to continue but couldn’t. Schumacher was widely accused of deliberately running into Hill, but the stewards decided it was a racing incident. Hill maintained a very dignified silence and kept out of the controversy. My private view was that Michael had been very lucky not to be penalised and thus lose his World Championship win. But the stewards had looked into the incident and come to the opposite conclusion. It was a matter of opinion and it would have been wrong to interfere, particularly after criticising Balestre for doing just that a few years before.