Kinda relies on you believing a single word Max Mosley says. I kinda got over that barrier some years ago. Max at this point is sounding very much like Dick Cheney.
It's a FOTA-good, FIA-bad attitude that got us this way in the first place. Mosley describes the way Ferrari put serious pressure on the FIA to prosecute McLaren, despite the FIA having a lack of evidence. You'll also notice that in the section on the FOTA breakaway, almost every single major action - Ferrari's legal action in the middle of a discussion, Toyota's attempted walkout - is performed by a manufacturer. The FOTA breakaway was not a teams initiative. It was the manufacturers. If the manufacturers had to spend four or five hundred millions dollars to be more competitive, they would. And they would naturally be opposed to any action by the FIA that would remove that advantage. If a FOTA breakaway had gone ahead, the manufacturers would have driven the sport into the ground as they spent billions of dollars with no-one to keep them in line. They'd all be looking out for themselves in the way the sport was governed and the way the new technical rules were introduced. We would have been fine to begin with, but the honeymoon period wouldn't ahve lasted long before the tams realised they could start setting things up to benefit themselves.
I'm not saying this article redeems Mosley. But I don't see anything in it that is suspiciously inconsistent. At his very best, Mosley only ever did as much harm as he did good, and that's me being generous. And as we've seen from the forums in Monaco and Orlando, Jean Todt is already having a positive effect on the sport, doing things Mosley never woud have done. Mosley was a villain, yet I'm open-minded about it. I'm not going to be assuming it's propaganda or an eleventh-hour attempt to regain credibility. Given the amount of criticism he's been receiving, I think it's only fair that he at least has the opportunity to defend himself, and this article delivers just that, which is why I posted it. I'm not expecting anyone to agree with me, because I know the anti-Mosley brigade is quite millitant. If he came out and declared the sky to be blue, I know you'd all disagree with him on principle.
As usual, look at everything that was left unsaid, that's where the fun stuff is.
By that, I assume you mean Renault?
Looking at the article, it's a pretty hefty piece. I'd estimate it as being a good 2000 words at least. You'll note that Mosley
only recounts the McLaren investigations and the FOTA breakaway saga; the article ends with FOTA going rogue. It's not like Mosley skipped ahead from the breakaway to his departure and the election of Jean Todt. No, I'd say this is the first part of the story, with a second one - dealing with Renault and Singapore - being held back because of space constraints.
The Telegraph is like any other paper: they have a limited amount of space to give away to articles; they might have an online component, and hence space is not an issue, but they tend to post articles both online and in the paper. They like those articles to be as homogenous as possible, because then you get into tricky situations where the same article implies two different things based on which version you read.
I'd actually prefer that the article be split like this (assuming there is another in the works). It gives Mosley a chance to do everything in detail, instead of including everything in one go, without fear of leaving holes wide open.
Max
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