MOTORSPORT: World of difference? Perhaps not

Mosley plots to drive FIA from back seat
Finally, it seems, Max Mosley is indeed going to go as president of motorsport's world governing body, the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA).

We say "finally" because there was the hiccup three weeks ago after he announced he wouldn't stand  for election for another (fifth) four-year term then turned around and threatened to stand again because he felt the car manufacturers that compete in Formula 1 were dancing on his grave.

And we say "it seems" because with Mosley and this presidency business we won't absolutely believe it until it happens.

The latest delay in signing a new Concorde Agreement -- to tie the F1 teams, the FIA and commercial tsar Bernie Ecclestone and his majority investor CVC for five years -- does not help. It was expected to be agreed on Wednesday but there's still no sign of that happening.

But Mosley, the man who was disgraced by a sex scandal less than 18 months ago but retained the support of his FIA colleagues, has written to the organisation's member clubs this week indicating that he won't go on beyond this year because of a desire to lighten his workload and as he is approaching 70.

He has anointed Jean Todt -- the man who ran Ferrari's F1 so successfully during Michael Schumacher's glorious years with the Scuderia, and who also had great success in World Rally Championship, Paris-Dakar and Le Mans team management -- as his successor.

Mosley's letter makes interesting reading. Most of it is contained in an ITV Sport report here and the full version can be found on the FIA website (fia.com) under Press Releases.

Todt hasn't put himself forward as a candidate at the time of writing and there may well be a lot of resistance to him -- certainly from F1 teams, who want someone independent, although it is not them, but rather the FIA's member clubs (national motorsport and motoring organisations worldwide) to decide Mosley's successor.

The only candidate so far is Ari Vatanen, one of Finland's legendary world rally champions, also famed for his drive up Pikes Peak in the US (a must-see video), and a man who counts himself as a friend of Mosley and who drove for Todt at Peugeot in the 1980s.

Vatanen questions Todt's suitability for the presidency and says the FIA needs "a new star ... an independent person who represents change".

A member of the European Parliament for a decade until recently, Vatanen's catchcry in any election contest will be: "If you want to win, take a Finn."

And he adds: "It might sound pretentious, but this is really about nobleness."

There are indications that, while Mosley is saying on the one hand that he won't seek re-election, that he wants to keep his hands on the steering wheel -- through engineering Todt into the post, and perhaps by chairing the FIA Senate and the F1 Commission that has been dormant in recent times.

The give-up sentence in Mosley's letter is: "As an ex officio member of the (FIA) Senate, I hope to play a modest role myself."

And Mosley says Todt "would be the ideal person to continue but also to extend the work of the past 16 years".

That is the work of Mosley; not the work over an even longer time, by Mosley's predecessors as well as him.

Clearly Mosley wants his successor to act as he would like, rather than for an incoming president to be a person of totally independent mind.

As Reuters correspondent Alan Baldwin wrote mid-week: the silence from FOTA (the F1 teams association) after Mosley's latest letter to FIA member clubs "was telling".

Contradictions of Australia's FIA representative
Auto Action magazine this week has run the second part of editor-at-large Mark Fogarty's enthralling interview with the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport's representative on the FIA, Garry Connelly.

Connelly still refuses to reveal how he voted on the confidence motion regarding Mosley at the big FIA meeting a year ago, in the wake of the sex scandal, and says he hasn't even told the CAMS board how he voted.

He says, though, that he is a servant of the CAMS board and that it was agreed with that board that decision on which way to vote not be disclosed, ostensibly "because we didn't want to run the risk of offending people with whom we want to have an ongoing relationship in either camp" (pro or anti-Mosley).

As Fogarty points out to Connelly, that is "a very convenient excuse".

We have no doubt that Connelly voted for Mosley, and indeed he says that -- with the likelihood now that the Englishman won't seek re-election -- "we (the FIA) have to very careful that we don't end up with a president who comes from the mobility (i.e. touring or everyday motoring) side of the FIA unless they have a good, strong sporting background".

With another hat on, Connelly is the man behind the new Rally Australia just six weeks away in NSW's Northern Rivers region -- and ran Australia's previous WRC round in Western Australia for most of its two decades.

In his Rally Oz capacity Connelly will be hoping for maximum media exposure of the event. Rallying has a sizeable worldwide following and a lot of guaranteed TV coverage, but it's not a form of motorsport that Australian media takes much interest in -- at any level.

What if the Australian media were to take the Connelly/CAMS refusal to reveal the stance taken on Mosley in that vote a year ago as a guide that they need not "disclose" anything much about the new Rally Australia?

Wonder how Mr Connelly and CAMS might feel about that? They might be about to find out!

Might it dawn on them at some stage that there is a great contradiction in craving exposure for events in which you are involved but totally lacking transparency in the way they otherwise handle matters. To coin an Australian football expression, these people like kicking with the wind.

With Rally Oz, in which Connelly last week revealed CAMS' financial ownership, they might find themselves kicking into a headwind.

Other than spectacular crashes, we can't envisage Australia's TV networks and major newspapers showing much interest in an event a long way from any capital city and without a front-line Australian competitor (even if Chris Atkinson eventually gets a drive).

And in the Northern Rivers region controversy continues about Tweed Council general manager Mike Rayner's involvement with Rally Oz, with claims he has breached the council's code of conduct in sitting on the rally board.

The place of manufacturers in motorsport
Much of the controversy about Mosley's recent presidency of the FIA has been about relations with the car companies competing in the sport.

We must say that we have admired Mosley standing up to these companies, insisting that they not be allowed to hijack the rule-making, which -- as he says -- is the role of the governing body.

We do question, however, the way the FIA often conducts itself, and especially the unquestionably brilliant Mosley, and particularly in the "Spygate" affair of 2007 -- from which Connelly told Auto Action the FIA did indeed reap tens of millions of dollars which is now being dispersed on "a facilities program, a young driver training program and an officials training program".

But Mosley's confrontations generally with manufacturers got us wondering just how car makers ought to go motor racing.

Firstly, most of them do go motor racing -- in Formula 1 we see Mercedes, BMW, Renault, Toyota and, of course, Ferrari (a subsidiary of Fiat and unique in that exists for racing), but no longer Honda. In rallying the main players are Citroen and Ford, and until last year Subaru was in there too. Mitsubishi and Suzuki have been as well. Audi and Peugeot were the key players at Le Mans and the Porsche and Aston Martin and others participate in sports car racing. Honda is the sole engine supplier in IndyCar, while in NASCAR the traditional American manufacturers Chevrolet, Ford and Dodge have been joined in recent times by Toyota.

But what got us thinking about what's the best approach is that in F1 Mark Webber has just won a Grand Prix in a Red Bull car with a Renault engine, with his teammate Sebastian Vettel second -- the pair of them whipping the factory Renault cars.

And the championship is being led by the Brawn car of Jenson Button with a Mercedes engine, which has whipped the McLarens to which Mercedes is most committed.

And in Australia the V8 Supercar Championship is again being led by Jamie Whincup in a Triple 8 Race Engineering/Team Vodafone Ford Falcon that doesn't even have a blue oval logo but instead a Hogster badge signifying a café chain and runs without financial support from the Ford factory.

While Whincup won one of the Townsville races last weekend the other went to James Courtney driving another Falcon without Ford factory financial support.

The two teams that the Ford factory does support financially, Ford Performance Racing and Stone Brothers Racing, haven't won a race between them yet this season.

Mosley and his old mate Bernie Ecclestone are right about one thing -- manufacturers will blow in and out of motorsport as it suits them, primarily for marketing reasons.

While they have a role, and a right, to play, we prefer to see teams run by dynamic individuals like Sir Frank Williams in F1, and now Ross Brawn and Christian Horner on behalf of Red Bull tycoon Dietrich Mateshitz, and V8 teams headed by Dick Johnson, Garry Rogers and (despite our reservations about foreign invaders in our primary national championship) Roland Dane.

Honda can't envisage return to F1
Honda chief executive Takanobu Ito says it is "a real shame" that his company had to pull out of F1 after last season -- opening the door for the creation of BrawnGP this year -- but it's clear Japan's No. 2 car manufacturer isn't missing GP racing.

"F1 is becoming less of a medium in which companies can test their various strengths and more of an event with mounting restrictions," Ito said. "There's little room for us to challenge new fields, so bearing in mind the current states of series, I don't think we have the desire to return, even if the economy improves."

Prodrive, on the other hand, is keen to get into F1 -- in the right conditions.

A column in Auto Action this week, again by editor-at-large Mark Fogarty, quotes Prodrive chief David Richards extensively on his disappointment at missing out on an F1 entry for next season, but that he wants to use Mercedes engines (in McLaren chassis) rather than have to run a Cosworth motor.

It's also reported in AA that Richards expects to announce Prodrive's next WRC manufacturer alliance later this season. Prodrive, which fielded Subaru's world rally team with so much distinction for so long, is reportedly talking to three manufacturers about a WRC program from 2011.

"We can have cars testing by about May next year," Richards said, but he wouldn't name the manufacturers he's talking to.

Game of musical chairs on GP grid
As expected, Sebastien Bourdais has been fired by the Toro Rosso F1 team -- and Spanish teenager Jaimie Alguersuari is odds-on to be his replacement, with a bundle of Repsol sponsorship to add to the Red Bull bucks. So what now for Bourdais?

Indy racing's colourful Canadian but these days very much part-time racer Paul Tracy doesn't want to see the French four-time Champ Car champion back on the North  American side of the Atlantic.

"I'd like to see myself back in the series before I see him here," Tracy said. "In my opinion it would be a criminal act to have him just walk into the (amalgamated Indy) series and welcomed with open arms and an open seat when I've had to lather everyone up with lotion just to get what little I've got."

Bourdais was part of the all-French line-up that finished second for Peugeot at Le Mans last month -- behind the victorious Peugeot that Australia's David Brabham shared with Spaniard Marc Gene and Austrian Alex Wurz.

Just on other F1 seats, Brazilian Nelson Piquet Junior is next in line to lose his place at Renault, while speculation continues that Ferrari's Finnish 2007 world champion is increasingly being linked to a switch to rallying.

Finnish sports magazine Veikkaaja quotes a friend of Raikkonen saying: "Kimi doesn't talk about F1 anymore. He just talks about rally."

Raikkonen is driving in the Rally of Finland at the end of this month -- the last round of the WRC before the new Rally Oz at the start of September. It's a crime that Raikkonen has kept his Ferrari seat, on the biggest pay cheque in F1, while seemingly so disinterested the past 18 months.

It's high time for him to make way for Fernando Alonso in a Ferrari, we say.

Might it have been the last German GP? Hockenheim has surrendered next year's race and Nurburgring promoter Walter Kafitz has said: "The only way we could manage (to stage) it would be if Bernie (Ecclestone) reduced his fee, but I cannot imagine he is willing to accept my wishes."

The final word (just for now!) on Webber's success is his column for BBC Sport, here and a column about him and how he always had star quality at the same site by British journalist and BBC F1 commentary box producer Mark Hughes, here.

Townsville tick but what's up in Hamilton?
Townsville's new V8 Supercar Championship event went off very well last weekend, but why oh why does V8 Supercars Australia executive chairman Tony Cochrane have to be such an ungracious "winner".

We saw Cochrane quoted saying: "This event replaced the appallingly run and hopeless Eastern Creek circuit (in Sydney) where last year we had something like 29,000 spectators over the three days and did something like $780,000 in corporate (sales).

"Here (Townsville) we've done many millions more in corporate. Totally sold out by Tuesday morning and the ticket results just are outstanding. To think that this event has knocked off the first year of Clipsal in Adelaide with total numbers is just ... we didn't have a number in our head anywhere near this number I can assure you. Not even close."

Now we all know that Eastern Creek hasn't been a winner with race fans in almost 20 years of its existence, but Cochrane's organisation has been partly responsible for promoting events there at times and hasn't shown itself to be a world-beater.

And while, yes, Townsville welcomed V8 Supercar racing in a very, very big and impressive way, it could be said that it was government -- federal and state -- money and Townsville council funds that created the platform for what looks to have been a financial bonanza for Cochrane's V8SA.

Now good luck to V8SA for making a big buck, but should it be for governments and councils to splurge taxpayer and ratepayer money building the foundations for those profits?

And while the V8 Supercar scene looks rosy on this side of the Tasman at this very minute, how come ticket prices have been slashed for the third year of the Hamilton street race in New Zealand when the place has supposedly been packed in its first two years?

Nine months out from next year's Hamilton event promoter Dean Calvert is saying "we need to be aware of how pricing is very sensitive".

And Calvert said his organisation and V8SA would be working to better promote the Hamilton 400 and he suggested a national roadshow, see here.

That's all well and good, but why would you need to go to such lengths -- and slash the ticket prices - if the first two events have been such overwhelming successes?

We well remember the chest-beating after the first Hamilton event -- although, unlike Townsville, there was some criticism of the track by drivers -- yet now ticket prices are being slashed?

There's a distinct whiff of sheep paddock manure in the air, and we wonder how the Townsville picture will look in two or three years.

And more so the Homebush experiment in Sydney.

Images: Mosley speaking with Todt at Imola; Mosley with Vatanen at the Rally of Jordan.

Read the latest Carsales Network news and reviews on your mobile, iPhone or PDA at www.carsales.mobi