Ferrari must play fair or go

Of one thing we can be sure. Formula One is desperately in need of new management. The present crisis in the sport, over an attempt by the FIA to introduce budget capping on the teams, has incidentally revealed details of a secret agreement it holds with Ferrari that should have no place in any professional sport.
Everyone has known for years that Ferrari, who are tomorrow launching a legal action in Paris against the governing body to try to stop the budget cap, has special treatment in Formula One. The Italian luxury sports car manufacturer is regarded by both Bernie Ecclestone, the sport's commercial rights-holder and Max Mosley, the FIA president, as the goose that lays Formula One's golden eggs, giving the championship a touch of class, glamour and historical continuity.
It is for this reason that when the Scuderia wins the manufacturers' world championship it is paid £55 million more than any other team, something that would be utterly untenable in any other sport.
Imagine Chelsea having a special deal with the FA under which they were paid tens of millions of pounds more than Manchester United or Arsenal for winning the Premier League - the notion would be laughed out of court.
Over the last two weeks, however, another more secret deal in Ferrari's favour has emerged in the course of the budget-capping row, but this time it is not with Ecclestone, but with the FIA. It appears that when the Italian team abandoned a breakaway move in 2004-05 by team bosses fed up with being starved of income by Ecclestone and returned to the FIA fold, not only did Ecclestone agree special financial arrangements for them, Mosley agreed to Ferrari having an exclusive veto over changes to the technical rules in the sport.
In other words, Ferrari would be able to stop anything they did not like or changes which they might suspect could be advantageous to their competitors or moves in technical directions which either did not suit their cars or the abilities of their designers and engineers. Ferrari could thus decide exactly how far apart the goalposts should be in what is supposed to be the world's pinnacle series in motor sport. Once again, any analogy with other sports underlines just how indefensible this arrangement is. Imagine the English cricket team having a secret deal with the ICC allowing them to veto any changes in the rules when this is not available to Pakistan, Australia or South Africa?
It is just possible to see why Ecclestone, as the commercial driving force behind the global business that is Formula One, might be allowed to vary payments to teams of differing circumstances - just. It is an altogether different case when it is the governing body itself that has chosen to favour one team against all the others in a deal which it has never admitted to up until now. The FIA is supposed to be an impartial, independent, rule-making body that sets a level playing field for all teams competing in Formula One. With this cosy backroom deal with Ferrari it has completely abandoned all those principles and cannot claim that it has acted with impartiality. Furthermore, there is no possible excuse for such favouritism; if Ferrari did not want to play in Formula One except on its own terms, Mosley should have shown the team the door, not indulged them.
The upshot is that in the French capital tomorrow Ferrari are going to the civil courts to apply for an injunction stopping Mosley introducing radical cost-cutting measures for next year, which most of the other teams now favour, because the Italians believe their secret deal, which they should never have had in the first place, has been broken by the FIA.
According to Ferrari, if the FIA wanted to impose a £40 million budget cap, it should have presented its plans to Maranello first, where the Italians could have vetoed it if they did not like it.
An FIA official admitted today that the deal has been kept secret until now (it emerged during leaked correspondence between Mosley and Luca Di Montezemolo, the Ferrari president, in the course of the budget cap row). “I am not sure it is something that we have discussed (in public),” he said. He tried to defend it by arguing that the 2005 agreement was merely a continuation of a secret arrangement with Ferrari that had been in place for years - in other words Mosley had merely endorsed a fix which he should have scrapped.
If one good thing comes out of the present crisis in Formula One, it should be the end of the feather-bedding of Ferrari, once and for all. All teams should get their fair share of the financial pot in a transparent manner and no teams should ever be given a secret right of veto over how the sport is governed. If Ferrari do not want to play a fair game, they should go elsewhere, which they are threatening to do in any case. The problem with achieving this is that Mosley and Ecclestone have run the sport for years as a double act on the telephone which is largely unaccountable. Until both of them have gone, which is unlikely to happen in the near future, the backroom deals can be expected to continue and the sport will be the poorer for it.
Source:The times