The Max Mosley memoirs

Max Mosley revealed earlier this year that he intends to publish his memoirs in the near future. He now appears to have given them something of a test-run in The Sunday Telegraph and Daily Telegraph, recounting the political events of the last three years in Formula One, from the spygate saga of 2007, to his tabloid expose in 2008, the threatened breakaway championship of 2009, and his own subsequent decision not to stand for re-election as FIA President.

These are fascinating and hugely controversial events, yet if the sample here is anything to go by, Max's publishers should anticipate disappointingly low sales, for Mosley's prose transforms these gripping events into a staggeringly dull epistle, utterly lacking in revelation, emotional insight, or personal anecdote.

It goes without saying that Mosley has now also fallen effortlessly into the typecast role of the deposed and deluded dictator, trying to retrospectively rescue his reputation by comprehensively re-writing history. In fact, the entire tract has, to use Mosley's own phrase, a superficial plausibility, but fails to stand up to analysis.

For example, reviewing the spygate saga, Mosley picks up on the fact that some of the McLaren engineers in 2007 referred to their source of information inside Ferrari as 'our mole':

"Armed secretly with the entire intellectual property of their main rivals, not to mention a flow of additional information from Nigel Stepney, their 'mole' inside Ferrari, McLaren had clearly enjoyed a massive but wholly illegitimate advantage."

It is unusual, however, to find a barrister taking linguistic cues from engineers, and the use of the term 'mole' here is quite inaccurate. The Collins English Dictionary defines a mole, in this context, as "a spy who has infiltrated an organization and often over a long period, become a trusted member of it." Stepney, in contrast, was a formerly loyal, but newly disgruntled Ferrari employee, who decided to exact his revenge by stealing commercially confidential information, and passing it to a McLaren employee. Stepney was therefore a Ferrari traitor, not a McLaren mole.

The fact also remains that, whilst there were plans to use braking systems on the 2008 McLaren which were inspired by Ferrari's systems, none of the confidential information passed from Stepney was ever actually used on a McLaren. Hence, it's difficult to understand in what McLaren's "wholly illegitimate advantage" was supposed to reside.

Mosley also has difficulty with factual accuracy, of which the following is only one example:

"A ban [on McLaren] would also have destroyed the great championship battle which was going on between Lewis Hamilton and Kimi Raikkonen."

Well, at the time of the second World Motorsport Council hearing in September 2007, when McLaren's punishment was meted out, the championship table read as follows: Hamilton (McLaren) 92, Alonso (McLaren) 89, Raikkonen (Ferrari) 74. But then perhaps Max doesn't follow the sport too closely.

Predictably, Mosley makes another attempt to justify the budget cap he sought to impose upon the teams, and criticises the resistance of the Formula One Teams' Association (FOTA) to this measure:

"It is quite extraordinary that apparently rational people in FOTA should have been so blind to what was going on and prepared to fight so hard for a doomed business model."

FOTA's position, of course, is that they also wished wholeheartedly to reduce budgets, but preferred to do so by way of voluntary agreements. If Mosley was so intent on keeping the manufacturer teams in Formula One in these economically straitened times, then it begs the question why he didn't join them in lobbying Bernie Ecclestone for a new Concorde Agreement which would give them a greater share of the commercial revenue generated by the sport, fully 50% of which currently flows into the hands of a private equity company. Moreover, if Mosley was so obsessed with reducing the costs of participating in the sport, one wonders afresh why the manufacturer teams were tasked with developing such hugely expensive Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) for the 2009 season.

In general, Mosley makes a sustained attempt to argue in his revisionistic history that, far from being a dictator, he was actually a forward-thinking, consensus-seeking, social democrat. Some of his own comments, however, rather give the game away in this respect:

"McLaren did not appeal. No doubt they realised that the ICA [International Court of Appeal] would almost certainly substitute a ban for the fine."

A judicial system in which subjects anticipate that an appeal will lead to greater punishment, is clearly a system which seeks to deter any such appeals. Just the type of judicial system, in fact, which a dictator would seek to establish.