Ecclestone Casts Doubt Over Mosley’s Power

F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone has warned that Max Mosley’s position as president of the FIA has been irreparably damaged despite him winning yesterday’s vote of confidence.

Ecclestone, who openly suggested Mosley should stand down prior to the vote of the FIA Council, fears the FIA president will continue to be shunned by major figures in the wake of the newspaper allegations that he took part in a ‘Nazi-style’ orgy with prostitutes.
 
Said Ecclestone: ‘It will be difficult for him to act as FIA president if the people who said before they don’t want to meet him maintain that. We are now in a position where nobody quite knows what will happen.’

Mosley won 103 of the 169 votes cast at yesterday’s meeting in Paris although a number of organizations, in particular the automobile associations, voiced their concern at the outcome of the vote.

A number of major motoring organisations indicated after the vote that they would suspend their relations with the FIA and there has been talk of a breakaway faction.

The American, Japanese, French, Australian and Spanish automobile federations were among those to vote against Mosley, as did the German motoring federation ADAC – Europe’s largest automobile organisation – which said it had now frozen all its activities with FIA.

If he continues to be avoided by major figures, Mosley will entrust deputies Marco Piccinini and Franco Lucchese to do his bidding while he performs to the best of his constrictive abilities.

But Ecclestone said he feared the fall-out could go further than that and affect F1 teams’ ability to find financial backing.

Despite these issues Ecclestone said he was ‘happy’ Mosley had won the vote, even though he had called for his resignation.

‘What I did not want to happen, indeed the last thing I wanted, was for Max to go on Tuesday, Up till now I have asked a million times that he resign at the end of November.

‘Before this saga, he had often confided to me that he had had enough, that he wanted to go and something else in life. On Tuesday, he got what he wanted. He is still there, that is all.

‘I was under all sorts of pressure from other people who said to me that Max could not carry on representing us. They said they could not support him and that I had to convince him to resign. I am no longer in that position.’

An FIA statement concluded: ‘The vote was not a comment on the president’s private life but a confirmation that the decision-making of the FIA must never be manipulated by external forces who may attempt to undermine its independent authority.’