FIA president Max Mosley has broken his silence on the conditional entry the nine FOTA teams made last Friday to the 2010 world championship.
Speaking to Swiss paper Motorsport Aktuell, Mosley made it quite clear that he is not going to entertain FOTA’s demands that the budget cap idea be abandoned, that the 2009 rules be carried over for next year and that the new Concorde Agreement be signed by June 12th, the date on which the successful entries will be announced.
“You cannot sign an agreement which was specified so late, before June 12th.” he said. Clearly not willing to back down on the central point of his plan, which is the budget cap.
“I say, if you want to make the rules, then go an organise your own championship. Formula 1 is ours, we make the rules. We’ve started 60 years ago and we will continue like that.”
Mosley wants new teams in F1 and believes that FOTA’s conditional entry is a tactic, “It’s quite clear that they want to slow down the process of application to the championship so that it will be too late for the new teams.”
The FIA believe they have the FOTA teams exactly where they want them. They believe that Ferrari is subject to the same legally binding agreement to compete that has compelled Williams to enter and for that reason, on June 12th I think they will name Ferrari as an entrant, despite the Italian teams’s desire to be part of the dissident group. After that it will be up to Ferrari to challenge for their right not to compete.
As for the rest, they may start to sweat a little as the 12th gets closer and they realise that this is a game of musical chairs and that when the music stops, they might well be left with no chair. Mosley may have felt compelled to say something after almost a week of silence but he is not blinking as things stand.