Silver lining: Lewis Hamilton drives a qualifying lap under gathering clouds at Silverstone yesterday, with the destiny of his sport uncertain due to financial wrangling. Photograph: Getty
MONEY, POWER and prestige, in that order, are at stake this week as FIA boss Max Mosley and commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone go head-to-head with the eight breakaway FOTA teams which have made the two Englishmen who run Formula 1 very ric
h indeed. It is a toxic brew in which commercial rivalries are spiced with personality clashes that mean neither side is likely to back down.
Mosley certainly thinks he has the whip hand. He has spoken of waging "a £1 billion legal war", and said that the FOTA teams "want to grab control of the sport on one side and (Ecclestone's] money on the other. They know it is never going to happen."
It is precisely that sort of pointed rhetoric which has persuaded the teams that it is time to act against Mosley, who has become more autocratic since he unleashed the backwoodsmen and outmanoeuvred attempts to unseat him following his exposure as an S&M aficionado. The 69-year-old lawyer has been in open warfare with some of the teams – notably McLaren and its boss Ron Dennis, with whom he has had a poisonous relationship for years and whose team he fined $100m for their part in the Stepneygate spying saga – and he has become increasingly irascible. Mosley's decision to stand for another five-year term as head of FIA has been the final straw for several teams.
Mosley isn't completely misguided though. Half of what he says is right because the teams do want to seize the power and the money, and who can blame them? They take the risk, and Bernie gets the cash – it's not a commercial equation anyone would relish.
And it's not as if Ecclestone and Mosley would have any compunction were the roles reversed. After all, they effectively did the same back in 1980 when they combined with the F1 Constructors Association and picked a fight with the FIA, staging pirate grands prix in Spain in 1980 and South Africa in 1982 as they racked up the pressure on the old guard, at one stage personally escorting FIA officials off "their" track. The teams were after the commercial rights then but were outmanoeuvred by Ecclestone, who grabbed them for himself through the Concorde agreement that the F1 Teams Association (FOTA) is now belatedly challenging.
Mosley is wrong, however, when he argues that the F1 teams would never be able to set up a rival championship. He surely knows that is not true. It is certainly the case that the teams have been reluctant to take such a step. They all know the mess that ensued when Indycars in the USA split into rival factions, a fracture which effectively destroyed top-level single-seater racing in North America. None of the rebels want to endure a similar situation.
Yet the nub of the issue is that the teams also know they are the main attraction. The reasons for that are at the heart of this dispute. While they all want to bring down the cost of competing – it costs Ferrari somewhere in the region of £290m a year to compete in F1, an unsustainable level for any team – it is also undeniable that the sport's fans follow F1 and the motor manufacturers want to put money into it precisely because it is conspicuously top-end. For many in the sport, that excess, that pushing of the technological envelope and willingness to spend £300,000 on a steering wheel, is the whole point of the sport, the fact which gives it its lustre.
Mosley's main aim in cutting the cost of competing was to open the sport to new teams from the lower echelons in order to stymie the main teams and prevent the palace coup now happening. That in turn is one of the prime reasons why FOTA have taken the great leap into the dark right now. By establishing a rival championship that runs in tandem with the F1 under Ecclestone and Mosley's aegis, the disparity between the two will be painfully apparent.
There is now a realisation that the teams are deadly serious. Organisations such as the BBC, just months into a £200m five-year deal to televise F1, are hedging their bets and privately saying that they could invoke force majeure to break the contract were the breakaway to proceed. After all, no-one wants to be left with an expensive contract to televise races between FIA's motley crew of GP2, F3 and touring car teams while Ferrari or McLaren or Jenson Button, responsible for a huge increase in viewing figures for the Beeb, are duelling elsewhere.
Nor are the broadcasters – upon whom Ecclestone's commercial empire rests – the only ones who are sitting this out. Lola, who had applied to join F1, have now withdrawn their application and look set to throw their lot in with the breakaway. Dave Richards' ProDrive and the Epsilon team which were to have joined F1 next year under the £40m initiative are rumoured to be following suit.
Of the two teams who have agreed to compete in F1 without preconditions next year, Williams are understood to owe Ecclestone such huge sums that they have no choice but to stay where they are. The same is not true of Force India, and it will be interesting to see how long it takes their owner, industrial magnate Vijay Mallya, to reassess his stance.
Although Ecclestone and Mosley, who is a lawyer of great talent and tenacity as his battle with the News of the World has shown, will try to mire the teams in a legal morass, they will know that most courts will not side with those they see as blatantly trying to be commercially restrictive. Which means that the breakaway teams will probably win through.
The main obstacles to the breakaway going ahead for 2010 if the teams are determined to go ahead are logistical. Thanks to Ecclestone, however, the lack of racing circuits won't be one of the problems FOTA faces. After effectively trying to bankrupt the Northamptonshire track, Ecclestone was this week cosying up to Silverstone and promising them next year's British Grand Prix. Its owners, the British Racing Drivers Club, are unlikely to so easily duped, however. As Ecclestone has courted the Asian and Middle Eastern market, he has left a string of abandoned European and American tracks in his wake. Indianapolis, Magny Cours, Hockenheim and Imola are just some of the many tracks that a FOTA breakaway could use.
There will doubtless be a bunfight over iconic tracks such as Monaco, but any contract that says the Principality can't run a FOTA race the week after or before the Grand Prix would struggle to stand up against a restraint of trade action in a court of law.
That, inevitably, isn't the way Mosley and Ecclestone see it. They still believe that the eight FOTA teams, when confronted with the legal booby-traps placed in their way, will see sense and come back to the table. "I am completely confident there will only be one F1 next year," said a bizarrely blase Mosley. "In the end people will do what it's in their interests to do and it's in the interests of the teams to be in the F1 Championship. It's all about personalities, power and who can grab what from whom, which is easy when there's nothing at stake. But once we get to the first race and it's make-your-mind-up-time, they will be there."
Whether or not that is true remains to be seen, but the suspicion that the gruesome twosome have overplayed their hand is gaining momentum. F1 is on the brink and in the final analysis it looks as if Ecclestone and Mosley might just need Ferrari and co more than Ferrari and co need Ecclestone and Mosley.
