Formula One and Beyond

by Max Mosley

  In contrast to 2007, McLaren themselves adopted the open and honest approach after the 2009 Australian Grand Prix. The race finished under the safety car with Jarno Trulli in third place and Hamilton fourth. Trulli had overtaken Hamilton while behind the safety car, which is against the rules unless invited to do so in order to regain position. As a result, the stewards docked Trulli 25 seconds, dropping him from third to 12th and moving Hamilton up to third. During their inquiry, the stewards asked Hamilton if he had waved Trulli past. Hamilton said he hadn’t, although he had previously given a TV interview saying he had.

  The FIA subsequently discovered a recording of the team telling Hamilton by radio to let Trulli past. At the next race, there was another stewards’ hearing and the recording was played to Hamilton and Dave Ryan, the McLaren sporting director. Both continued to deny that Hamilton had invited Trulli to overtake, despite the recording and Trulli’s testimony that Hamilton had waved him through. This new evidence led the FIA to reinstate Trulli’s third place, and to bring charges against McLaren because of the persistent lying. Misleading the stewards is a very serious matter, doubly so when the objective is to take a fellow competitor’s podium finish.

  The following day, Hamilton called a press conference at the Sepang circuit in Malaysia and admitted he had indeed waved Trulli past. I believe it was his father who (in my view rightly) suggested he do this, not the team. He apologised to his fans and the media for twice lying to the stewards and depriving Trulli of his podium finish, saying he had been pressured to do so by Ryan. Hamilton was strongly criticised in the media but at least he had abandoned the lie.

  McLaren sacked Ryan, who was a long-standing McLaren employee and greatly respected in Formula One. Many in Formula One were very surprised to hear that Ryan had told Hamilton to lie to the stewards without first consulting the team. At the subsequent World Motor Sport Council hearing, Martin Whitmarsh turned up alone and quite simply apologised for what had happened. The result was a very mild (perhaps too mild) three-race ban suspended for 12 months. The absence of lawyers and, more importantly, any attempt to deny what had taken place or mislead the council worked strongly in McLaren’s favour. I felt the verdict had at least helped give the lie to the allegations of an FIA vendetta against McLaren.

  What a contrast the whole affair makes with Stirling Moss’s honesty in defence of Mike Hawthorn at the 1958 Portuguese Grand Prix, which eventually enabled Hawthorn to win the World Championship by one point ahead of Moss. But at least this time the McLaren apologists in the paddock and beyond kept quiet. They had looked very foolish when the full facts of the Ferrari spying episode emerged at the end of 2007 and their accusations of a witch-hunt were shown to be nonsense. Now, with no dissembling from the team, even its most one-eyed supporter could understand what had really happened.

  In 2009, two years after ‘spygate’, I faced my last great cheating scandal. Nelson Piquet Jr, who had been driving for the Renault team alongside Fernando Alonso, fell out with team principal Flavio Briatore and was fired. It was typical of what happens in Formula One when a driver is not getting results: the team blames the driver who, in turn, blames the team. Shortly afterwards, Nelson’s father, a three-time world champion and an old friend, came to see me in Monaco and told me the full story of the crash at the 2008 Singapore GP. I didn’t tell him I had already heard some details of this, if only as a rumour. I said we needed a sworn statement from Nelson Jr.

  A few days later, a former senior Scotland Yard detective who was now working for Quest, the security organisation run by former Metropolitan Police commissioner Lord Stevens, took the statement. It confirmed the story that Nelson Jr had been instructed by his team to crash on a particular lap in a particular part of the circuit where his wrecked car could not easily be reached. This was to make sure the safety car would have to be deployed immediately after Alonso had refuelled, thus giving the team the colossal advantage that allowed Alonso to win the race. But I knew his statement, even if sworn, would not be enough on its own.

  By coincidence, Flavio Briatore invited me to lunch at the Rampoldi restaurant in Monaco to make peace after our conflicts over costs earlier in the summer. We had a friendly lunch and agreed such things were not personal. I said nothing about my conversation with Nelson Sr in the same restaurant a few days earlier, or the sworn statement that we now had.

  The problem was we still didn’t have sufficient proof. With something this serious, the lawyers said we needed proof to the criminal standard, in other words ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, rather than proof on the balance of probabilities which would apply in a civil case. We also knew that, if we simply charged the team on the basis of Nelson Jr’s statement plus the circumstantial evidence, they would say he had invented the story to get his own back for being fired. They would continue to claim it was pure luck that they decided to refuel Alonso’s car unusually early in the race, as they had told a number of sceptical journalists at the time. We needed much more.

  We decided to use the stewards’ powers to call members of a team in for questioning during a Grand Prix and put the plan into action at the Belgian Grand Prix in Spa. It was essential that it should be a surprise. If the team had been forewarned or we had sent someone to the factory to ask questions, it would have been easy for everyone involved to deny all knowledge of any sort of plot.

  We arranged for an expert barrister, accompanied by the senior former Scotland Yard detective, to enter the paddock secretly at the Belgian race. The idea was to question members of the Renault team separately before they were alerted or had an opportunity to confer. We made sure no one in the paddock knew what was going on except the race director, Charlie Whiting. The ploy succeeded and the interrogators got the necessary additional evidence.

  When we charged the team, the Renault board appointed a senior English barrister, Ali Malek QC, to mount an internal investigation. He carried out a detailed inquiry and called me two weeks later to say Renault were not going to contest the charge. He also said that Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds, the technical chief, would be leaving the team immediately. It seemed to us that was exactly how a big company should handle that kind of situation. The FIA does not have a police force and should not have to fight to get the truth out. Formula One is supposed to be a sporting contest and has to rely on the participants wanting to keep it that way.

  Because of the way the company had dealt with the matter, it was clear there was no case against Renault itself. They had done exactly what they should have done. We invited Flavio and Pat to the World Council to answer charges of having personally brought the sport into disrepute, but neither came and both were banned from Formula One. Flavio challenged this decision in the French courts and won a partial victory. The court did not like our procedures (commenting that the FIA didn’t have direct supervisory authority over team employees, because they didn’t have licences) and set the penalties aside. But it made no finding of innocence and did not exonerate Flavio or Pat.

  In the end, Flavio never answered the charges directly. Had he taken it to the FIA Court of Appeal he would have been entitled to a complete rehearing in front of entirely independent lawyers. His own lawyers could have argued that he himself was innocent and knew nothing of the plot, as he has continued to claim ever since. Instead, he chose to go to a civil court on a technical point, thus depriving himself of a fresh hearing and an opportunity to plead innocence in front of an independent tribunal.

  Our outside lawyers thought the French court’s judgment was hopelessly flawed, mainly because it’s fundamental in so-called domestic disputes that you exhaust the available internal remedies before going to the ordinary courts. In other words, Flavio should first have gone to the FIA’s Court of Appeal as was his right. He could have gone to a civil court later if he was still not happy. Had I still been president, we would have appealed and I’m quite sure we would have won. The judgment was so weak and badly reasoned that it almost fell apart in your hand. But by then we’d had th
e election and Jean Todt had taken over. He’s more risk-averse than me and did not want to take any sort of chance in the courts. He reached a compromise of sorts with Flavio and his lawyers, but the end result changed nothing of substance. I still see Flavio from time to time. As we agreed that time in the restaurant, these things are not personal.

  30

  CRASHING THE CAR INDUSTRY

  Although the FIA is popularly associated with motor sport, the original purpose of its constituent clubs in the different countries was to protect the interests of the ordinary motorist. The FIA’s function in its early days was to co-ordinate these efforts globally, and it secured international conventions on such things as traffic signs and the pedal layouts in early motorcars (some had the accelerator in the middle!). Of all the things I did or attempted to do in my 16 years at the head of the FIA, the one that gives me the most satisfaction is our work on road safety because it has undoubtedly saved thousands of lives.

  When I was elected in 1993, I had already been responsible for motor sport as president of FISA for two years. I now had responsibility for the road car side of the FIA as well. This had been largely moribund since the Second World War because the FIA concentrated on motor sport. The big motoring clubs all belonged to a rival global organisation, the Alliance Internationale de Tourisme, or AIT. Those with a sporting division also belonged to the FIA in order to keep their place in international motor sport, but the remainder, for example the AA in the UK or the ANWB in the Netherlands, tended to be AIT only.

  Given its active involvement during the first half of the 20th century, I felt the FIA should still be working for the ordinary motorist, particularly on safety. After all, the FIA member organisations had tens of millions of motorists on their books, spread across 130 countries. With thousands dying on the roads each year and governments doing little or nothing about it, road safety was an area that should be an urgent FIA priority.

  As noted in chapter 18, David Ward came to work for the FIA full-time after the death of the Labour Party leader John Smith and took over our activities in Brussels. The AIT already had an office in Brussels but didn’t want the FIA to share it because its member organisations, particularly those with no sporting division, were nervous of motor sport. The AAA in America had even given up the sporting power for the USA following the Le Mans disaster in 1955, and many motoring and allied organisations (such as the UK’s Caravan Club) seemed to have a rather old-fashioned view that motor sport was irresponsible.

  David set up a separate FIA office close to the European Parliament and it became a real force. After he had been there for a year or two, nothing much happened in Brussels to do with cars without our involvement in some form.

  Eventually, the big clubs with no motor sport division decided to abandon their rather ineffectual Brussels AIT office and asked if they could join us. They had begun to realise that motor sport, far from being a handicap, helped with politicians because it opens doors. Ask a politician to a seminar on road safety and he probably won’t come. Invite him to his country’s Grand Prix and you are much more likely to get a chance to talk to him. We eventually absorbed the entire AIT into the FIA.

  Backed by Alan Donnelly,5 a friend of David Ward and senior Labour MEP, I was elected honorary president of the European Parliament Automobile Users’ Intergroup – an all-party group of MEPs interested in motoring issues. This enabled us to build a valuable network of contacts in the parliament. As explained in chapter 23, following Ayrton Senna’s death in 1994 we had discovered that, astonishingly, there had been no new legislation for the protection of car occupants since 1974. Proposals were in the pipeline but not due to take effect for many years. The European Commission wanted improved standards for entirely new models from 1998 but not until 2003 for all new cars in the showroom. The car industry was running a determined campaign to weaken them and make them less costly and easier to comply with. With only one or two consumer groups to oppose them, they were succeeding.

  The FIA began a campaign in Brussels to stop the car industry watering down the new EU legislation. We knew the European Parliament’s role would be crucial because the Maastricht Treaty had just given the legislature stronger powers to propose amendments to the commission’s directives. One of David’s last tasks for John Smith was an analysis of the major changes brought about by Maastricht. As a result, he knew all about the parliament’s enhanced powers, which were only slowly being understood in Brussels.

  As a senior member of the parliament’s Economic Affairs Committee, which had responsibility for the crash-test legislation, Alan became the rapporteur for the draft directive. This put him in the driving seat to toughen up the proposed standards, using the parliament’s new powers. With the help of officials from the UK Department for Transport, David supplied Alan with over 50 draft amendments to the EU legislation. These dropped the weaker front- and side-impact crash tests proposed by the industry and replaced them with more realistic and demanding tests. One MEP joked that, although he had great respect for Mr Donnelly’s ability, even he did not believe Alan had drafted these highly technical amendments himself. The MEP was right, of course. One of the experts in the UK Department for Transport who helped us had raced against me in Clubmans Sports Cars in his younger days.

  In 1995, Alan persuaded his committee to hold an open hearing on the issue, which ensured that the discussion would get public exposure despite its highly technical nature. Now we needed a way to make a detailed technical discussion about the dimensions of crash-test barriers and the height of side-impact points a hot political topic for the media. We set out to dramatise the issue so that our solid evidence in favour of more stringent and realistic crash tests would have a chance of being voted through by the parliament.

  We invited Gerhard Berger, a leading Formula One driver and former team-mate of Ayrton Senna, who was then driving for Ferrari, to join the FIA’s delegation to the European Parliament hearing. Alongside our technical experts, Gerhard explained he was safer crashing in his Formula One car than in a typical road car, despite the racing car’s much higher speeds. This was because the FIA had started to apply realistic crash tests. His evidence attracted real attention and, to our delight, an outraged industry representative even heckled us in the meeting. Thanks to Gerhard, quite obscure details of crash-testing were shown on primetime German TV.

  International coverage was extensive, including, for example, a full-page feature in The Times written by Kevin Eason, who later became its Formula One correspondent. The detail was hard to follow but the message was clear: the car companies are trying to avoid making your car safer in order to boost their profits. Apart from the general media coverage there was strong support from MEPs.

  Alan’s proposed amendments were unanimously accepted first by the parliament’s committee and then by the entire plenary meeting of the parliament in Strasbourg. With parliament now strongly backing the FIA’s position on the draft directive, the European Commission had to decide whether to object or accept the parliament’s amendments. The responsible commissioner was Martin Bangemann of Germany.

  Fortunately, I had a perfect opportunity to persuade him because Alan had proposed him for an honorary degree from Newcastle University. I decided I had to go from Brussels to Newcastle for some reason the very same day of the ceremony and offered him a lift in the FIA plane. I managed to convince him of our case for road safety and he immediately saw the point of realistic crash tests. He decided to support the parliament’s view and stop any further negotiation with the car industry. In truth, it wasn’t a problem for the industry. Provided they all had to adopt higher standards, there was no competitive advantage or cost disadvantage for any individual company. With the final hurdle crossed, the amended directives were to start coming into force three years later, in January 1998, and finally take full effect in 2003. This marked the start of major improvements to car safety across Europe.

  Apart from the debate over new EU laws, various organisations an
d governments were crash-testing cars and publishing the results as information for consumers. But the tests all used different and confusing standards and therefore, understandably, no one took much notice. A uniform and pan-European approach was required, exactly the sort of issue where I thought the FIA should be taking the lead. I persuaded the FIA Senate to agree a £1 million budget for crash-testing, justifying it on safety grounds for the enhanced protection of the millions of motorists who belonged to the FIA’s member organisations.

  I also pointed out to the Senate that if there were ever another major accident like the one at Le Mans in 1955, we would need friends in politics if we were to protect motor sport. It would be too late to start wooing politicians after the event; we would need them onside immediately, already well briefed about the lives that were being saved because of what motor sport was doing for the ordinary road user. If we had a big accident without all this in place, we would risk politicians banning motor sport. It had been banned in some countries following the 1955 Le Mans catastrophe, and the public were much more sensitive to death and injury now than they had been in 1955, only ten years after the end of the Second World War.