Hide Your Television Sets: Luca Di Montezemolo Gets Angry

As president of FOTA, Ferrari boss Luca di Montezemolo has a responsibility not only to his own team, but to all the other Formula One teams as well.

So when the Italian comes out, as he did today on Ferrari's official Web site, and criticises the FIA for the raft of rule changes they announced this week, you can guarantee that he is speaking for a large number of people within FOTA, as well as for himself.

Montezemolo described the current situation as "absurd, severe and dangerous," referring not only to the rules themselves but to the fact that they have been unveiled less than two weeks before the start of the season.

In the wake of the FIA's announcements, Montezemolo and the rest of FOTA undoubtedly feel that they have been sidelined in F1's decision-making process, with FOTA's pledge to cut costs by half all but ignored by the governing body, who have instead ruled that a $42 million budget cap will apply to some of the teams from 2010 onwards.

FOTA's other suggestion, to alter the points system to put greater emphasis on winning Grands Prix, was rejected in favour of a rehashed version of Bernie Ecclestone's earlier idea of an Olympic-style medals system.

Montezemolo will suspect, as many others do, that this is all part of a scheme by the FIA to curb the influence of FOTA before they become too powerful and upset the status quo in Formula One.

There are a lot of elements at work here. The teams have said that they will cut the costs of competing in exchange for a bigger share of F1's commercial revenues.

By imposing as stringent a budget cap as $42 million, the FIA (and Ecclestone, who is in de facto control of F1's commercial affairs) will ensure that the teams can run a profitable operation without the need for greater handouts from the commercial rights holders.

The rights holders themselves, CVC Capital Partners, are reluctant to yield any of the income they currently take from F1, as they need every penny to service the loans they took out to purchase the commercial rights in the first place.

Then again, nobody really believes that the final 2010 budgets will really be as low as $42 million. What FIA President Max Mosley is doing is setting a starting point for negotiation with the teams.

Much as he did with his threat of standardising the engines for Formula One cars a few months ago, Mosley is attempting to goad the teams into action with outlandish and unrealistic statements.

The teams will negotiate for this cap to be raised, but Mosley and Ecclestone will be hoping that they can keep the eventual budgets low enough that CVC does not have to cede any more money.

Rejecting FOTA's proposal for changing the points system was a way for the FIA to put the new organisation in its place.

Until recently, the teams have been pursuing different and often contradictory interests. One particular point of contention was that Ferrari always appeared to side with the governing body rather than with the rest of the teams.

Now, with the rise of FOTA, the teams are expressing an unprecedented display of unity—a display that terrifies Mosley and Ecclestone.

After all, uniting the teams against the governing body was exactly how the pair of them ascended to their current influential positions in the first place.

Thus it has been in the interests of the FIA and FOM, under the leadership of Mosley and Ecclestone, to attempt to cause divisions within FOTA and render them an ineffective talking-shop rather than a united front.

In doing so, they undoubtedly hope, some teams will grow tired of achieving so little through FOTA and leave, undermining the organisation's credibility.

The future of Formula One is therefore dependent on whether FOTA can withstand the pressure being brought upon them by the FIA; if they can do so, F1 may begin to assume a form more palatable to the teams, rather than to the interests of Mosley and Ecclestone.

That said, there is no guarantee that we may not find ourselves in a similar situation twenty years or so down the line, should FOTA succeed.

One interesting footnote to this story is that former Ferrari team principal Jean Todt resigned all his roles within the team earlier this week.

Todt has been tipped to succeed Mosley as FIA President for some time now; it could be the case that FOTA are grooming him for a presidential campaign, as a FOTA-backed candidate, when Mosley's term of office expires in October.

One thing is for certain: Luca di Montezemolo's frustrations, vented this morning on Ferrari's official Web site, will not be the last we hear in this saga.