Max Mosley – 1940-2021

Without the accident of parentage, Mosley had the intellect and driving ambition to be a 20^th Century politician of note, perhaps even a national leader. Instead, the shadow of his fascist father Sir Oswald Mosley and mother Diana, one of the notorious Mitford sisters and an unapologetic Nazi sympathiser, drew him to a corner of the world where such context didn’t matter. Instead of a national stage, motor racing would be his political playground.

Mosley graduated from Christ Church College, Oxford in 1961 and worked with his father’s post-war political party the Union Movement before being called to the bar. It was during the mid-1960s that he discovered a fascination with motor racing and began to compete, rising as high as Formula 2. He was among those who raced at Hockenheim in 1968 when Jim Clark was killed and soon after accepted he would never amount to world champion material. Instead, he joined forces with Robin Herd, Alan Rees and Graham Coaker to form a new racing car constructor, March, which took its name from the initials of the founders.

Remarkably, Herd’s 701 conquered three of its first four Formula 1 races in the hands of Jackie Stewart and Chris Amon, but through the rest of the 1970s March would never have it so good in such terms. By 1977 Mosley was ready to sell his share in the company and take a very different perspective on motorsport, after striking up a friendship and partnership with Bernie Ecclestone – the defining professional relationship of his life.

They were the perfect foil for each other – one a sharp-witted former second-hand car salesman, the other a smooth-talking but no less incisive Oxford-educated barrister – and between them, under the auspices of the Formula One Constructors Association (FOCA), they began a carefully contrived F1 power-grab. The ‘FISA/FOCA war’ of the early 1980s brought the struggle between the FIA’s sporting authority and the predominantly British teams to a head, with Ecclestone emerging as the victor – and the freshly minted Concorde Agreement grasped in his hand, through which he would control the sport for decades.

Mosley was drawn away from motor racing in the 1980s to work for the Conservative party in mainstream UK politics, only to return frustrated by his experiences. He emerged as a challenger to the FIA’s long-standing and famously autocratic president Jean-Marie Balestre and in 1991 became president of FISA, then two years later merged the organisation with the FIA parent body. Between them, now he and Ecclestone held all the cards.

His reign at the FIA lasted until 2009, during which time he stoked seemingly endless controversy via the combative manner he chose to bring to the role. The deal he struck in 1995, when he sold the sport’s TV rights on a 100-year lease to Ecclestone’s company for a relatively derisory sum of £360m, began a running battle with the teams that would last until the end of his time in office. At the same time, Mosley pushed through a raft of technical changes in the wake of Ayrton Senna’s death in 1994 that finally began to address F1’s many shortcomings on safety, and in a directly effective manner that would likely have been beyond any other sporting leader. 

At times during his era, the politics of F1 submerged the sporting element. In 2005 the US Grand Prix tyre safety debacle engulfed Michelin, the teams and the whole of F1. Mosley always maintained his insistence that he acted properly as FIA president to steer F1 through the crisis, and likewise in the wake of McLaren’s ‘spygate’ episode in 2007 when the team was fined $100m and excluded from the constructors’ championship for a case involving stolen Ferrari technical drawings. Both were notorious examples of Mosley’s domineering rule and by the time he left office in 2009, having initially ridden out the sex scandal that would have forced most people to retreat in embarrassment, F1 teams and the car manufacturers that by now had invested in the sport were eager for a fresh start.

Beyond the new privacy legislation he inspired, Mosley’s work on mandatory EuroNCAP crash tests to improve road safety was his most positive contribution to the world – and more significant than anything he achieved in F1. In the wake of Senna’s death, he had looked to the wider automotive industry to draw on its examples for F1’s benefit, only to be appalled by what he found. That spurred a crusade that ruffled feathers at the car giants, but ultimately reduced deaths in road accidents by a significant number.

Mosley was a brilliant man who was all too aware of his intimidating power. But in his choice of how to lead, he divided rather than unified motorsport, staining his legacy at the helm of this world for many who witnessed him at work.

Photography courtesy of Motorsport Images