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Tabloid scandal scuppered Mosley's cost cutting plan

Max Mosley's legal battle with News of the World hampered his work as FIA President © Getty Images

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Max Mosley believes he could have succeeded in implementing cost cutting measures in the sport had it not been for the tabloid scandal that disrupted his job as FIA President.

Mosley was involved in a number of well publicised disputes with Formula One teams, most notably over budget cap proposals that led to threats of a breakaway series from the bigger manufacturers.

"[The budget cap] would've worked," Mosley told Sky Sports F1. "It would've been completely feasible. What stopped it was I couldn't push it through. I ought to have been able to say to Ferrari, 'you can enter or not enter, but these are rules'. But I couldn't do that because when I had that problem with the newspaper, the two teams that stood by me were Williams and Ferrari.

"So it sort of went into the long grass and by 2009 some of the richer teams had seen that if you were a rich team and the other seven or nine were poor, you had less competition."

Mosley's disputes with certain teams led to the formation of the Formula One Teams' Association (FOTA) in 2009 but several teams, including Ferrari and Red Bull have since left. And Mosley thinks the very nature of competition within the sport renders FOTA counterproductive anyway.

"The thing is the teams are competing with each other and I don't see how they will ever get together in the common interest. That's the function of the governing body. It should be the governing body, for example, that imposes the Resource Restriction Agreement. Are you [as a team] actually going to sue Red Bull if you think they've spent too much?"

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